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Sell Digital Products With WordPressThu, 24 May 2018 03:08:50 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.5141804917Measurement that matters: The top website and eCommerce metrics for digital productshttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/top-website-ecommerce-metrics-for-digital-products/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/top-website-ecommerce-metrics-for-digital-products/#commentsTue, 22 May 2018 14:00:51 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1237006Numbers and metrics can be stressful. As a business owner, you’re likely swimming in numbers every day.

Revenue, net profit, tax, expenses… numbers and statistics are your life. Plus, you’re also the creator of your digital product or service, working tirelessly in an increasingly saturated online market, getting it done.

You do your best to keep one eye on website stats, but how on earth are you supposed stay on top of your business’ performance data without losing sight of your next update, your newest product, or your next client’s job? How can you avoid spending precious product-creation or client hours each week analyzing alllllll the data?

In this article we’ve pulled together the most important website and eCommerce metrics specifically for digital products, so you can spend less time living in a statistical slurry, and more time working on improving and growing your business.

Tools for metric mastery

Before we get into which metrics are most important, here’s a short list of some useful analysis and performance tools to see what’s going on under the hood of your website.

Google Analytics is possibly the most popular tool for website performance measurement. It’s also free!

Jetpack for WordPress (also free at the entry level) is a plugin that provides basic site statistics, among other things for blog sites.

Paid services or plugins can give you even more detailed visibility on what actions users are taking on your website. Some examples of these are Monster Insights (which pulls Google Analytics data into your WordPress dashboard), Crazy Egg, and Kissmetrics for detailed customer data. Baremetrics is another extremely useful tool that can consolidate your website’s performance statistics and conversion data. And finally, cart abandonment tools such as Jilt and Carthook can help you learn how much money you’re missing out on.

Traffic and site statistics

Your website is your home on the internet. The place where your business lives. If you’re yet to look into website metrics, this is the very first place you should start.

Total users, sessions, & page views

Yep, website traffic seems obvious, but keeping a close eye on these statistics helps you understand what’s working on your website. Whichever analysis tool you decide to use, there are usually three main data measures you will see related to traffic: users, sessions, and page views.

Users are visitors who land on your website. Users can either be returning or new/unique.

A session occurs when a user visits your website. It can also be referred to as a visit. This is the period of time that a user is active on your website. Analytics tools use sessions to track a visitor’s movements throughout your website. A session can run for any amount of time – it is recorded from when the user first lands on your website, and ends when they leave your site.

A page view occurs when a user who is on your website views one of your website pages during a session. Total page views includes repeat views of pages. Unique page views count how many pages are viewed during a session.

These measurements show you how many people are coming to your website. You can see how your website activity is growing over time, and align the dates and metrics with any changes you may have introduced to your business or site.

For example, if you start regularly tweeting about your new course, and you see a spike in website users, there is likely a correlation between your activity on Twitter and your site statistics. An increase in website traffic or number of users can help grow your conversions and sales if they find what they are looking for on your site.

Bounce rate & session duration

Similar to user, session, and page view data, the amount of time a user spends on your site is important. A higher session duration could mean that a visitor is browsing your website, evaluating your products, or spending time looking through your content. When people spend more time on your website, they are more likely to convert and less likely to bounce. Check out the Google Analytics below data from our own website, paying particular attention to the Sessions with Transactions data segmentation (orange squiggly lines).

The session duration is significantly higher (~10 minutes) for visitors that went on to complete a transaction, and the bounce rate is much lower.

Whilst you can see how your website grows with user, session and page view data, you should also pay attention to your bounce rate and which page users are exiting your site from. If certain pages have a particularly high bounce rate, you should consider what you can do to improve them. Can you redesign them? Do they need more information? Should you set up a landing page to funnel higher qualified leads into the next page of your site?

Abandoned cart rate

Segueing from bounce rates, if a large number of users are leaving your site from the checkout page, it might be time to start looking at some tactics to get them back. Cart abandonment is becoming a more prominent conversion-killer for many eCommerce stores, with up to 69% of carts abandoned by shoppers. But you don’t have to leave that money on the table and lose a hard-won visitor! Using a cart abandonment tool will show you how many users are leaving your site, and can even help you recover at least a percentage of lost sales.

We use Jilt, but there are numerous options available such as CartHook, Rejoiner, and many more. You may also consider an exit-intent tool such as OptinMonster or Thrive Leads to see what page a user is on when they move their mouse to close their browser (and exit your site!).

User Actions

What do people do when they land on your website? There are numerous metrics that could be discussed in this section, but one remains more important than all others.

Conversions & conversion rate

The most meaningful action a user can take on your website is a conversion. A conversion could be any one of the following user actions based on what you sell or what services you offer:

Making a purchase

Engaging with content

Entering their email address for a discount

Signing up to a newsletter

Sharing your site with others (through sharing buttons)

Entering a competition

Taking part in a survey or quiz

Downloading a product or other item

Voting for, rating, or leaving a review on a product or page

Clicking a button that redirects them to a specific page

If your business is already up and running, you should have in mind what your conversion goals are. In most cases, the primary conversion goal is for a visitor to make a purchase.

Conversions are your initial measure of success. This means the person who visited your website performed the action you wanted them to take. The number of conversions on your website (based on your conversion goals) is important, as it allows you to understand your conversion rate.

Your conversion rate can be calculated by dividing your number of conversions by another metric. Depending on what you want to know, you may choose to divide your number of conversions by:

The number of visitors to a specific page

Your total website users

Qualifying leads

Sessions

Or unique visitors/new users.

For example, if you have 50 conversions on your site, and 1,000 sessions, your conversion rate is 0.05. Multiply this number by 100 and you get your percentage = 5% in this example.

Conversion Rate % = Number of Conversions / Number of Visitors * 100

If you’re interested to know whether your conversion rate can be improved to meet any specific industry benchmarks, I’d recommend doing a bit of digging and research. We haven’t found much in the way of conversion rates purely for digital products out there, but I’m happy to share some numbers from our own site!

Google Analytics shows that our conversion rate for the year to date (YTD) is 3.44% (1 January, 2018 to 21 May, 2018). The way GA calculates this conversion rate = eCommerce Transactions / Total Sessions (“The percentage of sessions that resulted in an eCommerce transaction”). If I were to look at eCommerce Transactions / New Users (unique visitors), the conversion rate is 5.8%, because the total New Users figure is lower than the Total Sessions (visits). This means that of the total New Users who have visited our site YTD, 5.8% of those visitors made an eCommerce transaction.

Revenue

Alllllrighty then! We’re at the business end of this article. Let’s talk money!

Number of sales/orders

Because you sell products or services, the number of sales or orders you receive is an important success measure. A sale is a conversion on your site that actually puts money in your pocket. A transaction. I’m sure I won’t need to tell you to track this one, because you probably already do.

As previously mentioned, pitting the number of users or sessions versus your number of sales will show you how many people are purchasing from you. It gives you a percentage of conversions in the form of your conversion rate. It’s not possible to work out your conversion rate without your number of sales! Your eCommerce plugin or platform will provide this reporting data, as will several other tools mentioned earlier (Google Analytics, Baremetrics, Monster Insights).

Gross Revenue/Earnings

Gross revenue is your total earnings before all expenses are subtracted. This number is important because it helps you figure out how much money you actually walk away with after everything else has been paid. Your gross revenue is not your final net profit number. You still need to consider expenses, tax, commissions (if applicable), marketing costs (if applicable), and any other business expenditure.

One bonus for digital products is that the cost of goods needed to make products is generally very low, if not zero. For solopreneur services, this is even more true: when you have completed your client work, received payment, and set aside tax and any other business expenses, you retain the majority of your earnings to be drawn as income or to be dealt with as you please. Ongoing gross revenue provides visibility into how your products or services are performing as you progress and grow.

Refunds

When a customer sends through a refund request, it can be a gut-wrenching experience. But refunds are a part of business. Whilst it’s not the nicest metric in this list, it remains one of the most important. In most instances, refunds can only make your product better. Knowing how many refunds you have can help you improve your product, update your website, prompt you to change your sale terms and conditions, or tweak your pricing strategy. Refund data is usually found in your eCommerce system or plugin.

If you’re receiving a high number of refunds, dig in further to try and understand why. Feedback from customers explaining why your product is the best place to start.

On the flip side, a lower refund rate can validate numerous things:

You may learn that you have mostly happy customers

It can be validation that your product is positioned correctly in your industry

You may learn that your product features tick all the boxes

And it can be confirmation that your business is on the right track.

Average Order Value

Average Order Value uncovers how customers are purchasing your products. How much are they spending per order? Are they buying one item, or numerous items when they visit your site? What are their buying habits?

To calculate your Average Order Value, divide your total revenue by the number of orders.

Average Order Value = Total Revenue / Number of Orders

Depending on the type of digital product you are selling, it may be more profitable and less costly to focus on increasing the AOV of the customers who visit your site. If you sell a whitepaper that is a one-time purchase, users may not have a need to buy more, so the AOV will remain the same for every purchase. However, if you are selling music or eBooks, and you offer a small discount for 5 products, the user may add 5 products to their cart, increasing the AOV.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure

Metrics are great and all, but if you don’t do something with them, there’s little point in collecting them. Understanding and using your data allows you to grow your business. If you don’t know how your site is performing, how do you know which pages to optimize, or how customers engage with a page, or where to focus your marketing efforts?

Metrics are for doing, not for staring. Never measure just because you can. Measure to learn. Measure to fix.Stijn Debrouwere

If growth and progress is your ambition, it’s imperative that you know what is performing well on your website, and what isn’t. By starting with the metrics above you can begin to define goals and implement strategies based on what you want to achieve.

This list is not a complete list of all website or business metrics. Metrics can be segmented even further, into types of devices used, browsers, landing pages, time of day, time of year – and that’s barely scraping the surface!

Remember that not all metrics are created equal. The behavior and mindset of the users who purchase a typography bundle on your site during a sale period will be completely different to your brand loyalists who return to purchase when you release a new font. For this reason, data should be considered holistically over a period of time with any relevant context noted.

Phew! OK, ready to start working towards a metric boatload of users, conversions and revenue?!

Which metrics are most important to you? How have you used data to make improvements to your digital products or store? Let us know what you measure in the comments, and how!

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/top-website-ecommerce-metrics-for-digital-products/feed/41237006Selling Audio and Musichttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-audio-and-music/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-audio-and-music/#commentsTue, 15 May 2018 14:00:04 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1226292Over the past few months, we’ve been diving into all the different types of digital products which can be sold online. As you may have perceived from the title, we’re addressing selling audio this week…

There are so many different kinds of audio based digital products. People will pay for audio which entertains them, soothes them, informs them, inspires them, and helps them achieve business goals, to list just a few examples. Audio products can be things like:

Recorded lectures

Musical samples

Audiobooks

Foreign language lessons

Relaxing background noises

Karaoke versions of popular songs

Reusable sound effects

And there are so many more. Audio is a powerful medium for communicating messages and delivering value. It’s also a vibrant market, rich with opportunities to turn creativity into cash.

Do you have ambitions for selling audio products? Reflect first on this information:

Pricing

Audio pricing varies greatly but within certain segments standards do exist. Music intended only for listener enjoyment can definitely be sold but competes with the vast amounts of freely available music elsewhere online. Artists who have already achieved some notoriety can earn money selling individual tracks and albums through music marketplaces like iTunes, Amazon and Google Play, but most musicians will be unable to earn anything significant due to the low prices for music and the overwhelming competition.

As is the case for most product types, businesses pay more and are more likely to pay. Fortunately, there’s a lot of room for audio based products serving commercial needs. Short audio tracks intended to be used for background music in commercials are an example of something in the music category commonly sold to businesses. Podcasts need intro “bumper” tracks. Videos for advertisements, tutorials, training, etc. are all complimented by musical samples. Audio engineers and audio based show hosts often require libraries of sound effects to use within their content. All of these are just examples of the products already in demand.

Many successful e-Learning sites employ audio to provide or supplement their lessons. Recordings of teacher lectures, recitations of vocabulary words, and interviews with relevant topic experts are examples of audio being used in educational contexts.

When sold individually, most audio products can justify only a small price such as $0.99 songs on iTunes or a $7 audiobook. More and more common today are subscription based sites which grant customers access to audio files on a site for as long as they continue paying.

Before making final pricing decisions, I recommend reading our other post on pricing digital products. But also keep in mind that you absolutely can change your prices, and probably should on a regular basis.

Ongoing revenue

As is the case with video, audio tends to be a consumable good with rapidly diminishing utility. Some audio will be continuously replayed (like my Nickel Creek or Chevelle CDs), while in other cases a single listen is sufficient (like the audio version of Game of Thrones). Continuing to charge customers usually requires creating new products constantly. These new products could be up-sold to past customers or could simply give them a reason to renew if operating on a subscription model.

Incorporating a strategy for recurring revenue may not be possible or important to your business. But if it is, there are a few options available. Such as:

Site memberships. Membership sites are all the rage these days. If your catalog is substantial and/or your products are the kind which customers desire access to consistently rather than just once, your customers may be happy paying you on a subscription basis just to be able to login and download what they need, when they need it. Additionally, if your catalog is constantly changing, customers may prefer the membership model because it is simpler for them compared to evaluating and buying new items as they are released.

Licensing and royalties. Some products can be licensed so that users must pay a fee in order to legally use them or create and distribute derivative works.

Provide services. This is obviously distinctly different from selling digital products, but is worth mentioning because the two can be linked. Many audio-centered online businesses offer services which produce audio files. For example, one could record spoken translations of text or audio in other languages. Or simply vocal recordings of text like blog posts, eBooks, or course material. Or musical accompaniments like drum tracks or cowbell solos. The possibilities are virtually endless.

All this said, recurring revenue is not a requirement. In fact, the vast majority of audio sellers that we encounter are relying entirely on one-time sales with no subscription option.

Distribution

Channels

Different types of audio offer different types of outlets for getting into the ears of customers. Musicians can sell their MP3s on major music stores or make them available via streaming services like Spotify. Marketplaces do exist for tracks intended for commercial use. Audiobooks are most easily distributed through popular sites like Audible.

Of course, any creator of an audio product always has the option of creating their own site and selling files there, direct to customers. Self hosting and managing a digital store is worth considering for any audio entrepreneur. When operating independently, as in not selling on someone else’s platform, there are a number of core benefits. These include getting to maintain the relationship direct with customers, having complete control over pricing, not having to share any of the profits, and developing a standalone brand.

Recommending where and how to sell your audio product requires a certain amount of insight into your longer term plans, skills, and resources. In most cases though, if selling the product is a side project and not something you are looking to expand and build upon, then it is smart to find the most relevant marketplaces and sell through them. On the other hand, if the product is just the beginning and a bigger future is planned, creating an independent eCommerce site will be a worthwhile investment.

Format

Audio is very similar to video (which we’ll cover in another post soon), in that there are choices to be made regarding how the content is delivered to customers. Audio can be streamed or it can be downloaded The right choice depends on your desired user experience, how the customer will be wanting to use the track and, in some cases, bandwidth limitations.

If allowing files to be downloaded, the specific file formats you make available are important. MP3s are a very popular format for music, audiobooks, spoken word and more. But .wma, .wav, .aiff, .aac, .mid and many others are relevant for certain uses and may be requested by customers. Be sure to look into which formats potential customers are using now and be prepared to either offer multiple formats or to have answers for customers who ask for something different than what you have. Those answers could be to recommend audio conversion tools, seek alternative sources, or just deal with it and use what you provide.

Other considerations

Much like with video, file sizes are significant. If dealing with a large catalog of files or processing a high volume of transactions, offloading to a third party service instead of storing files locally on your web server (if you are running your own site) would be advisable. Amazon’s S3 offering is a popular choice but others exist such as Dropbox and Digital Ocean’s new Spaces product. These kinds of services can be extremely valuable because they:

have scalable pricing models which allow you to pay as you grow

allow you to separate your website files from your product files (better for management and also for security in case your website is ever compromised)

deliver files faster and more reliably

change where your website is hosted without migrating all of your product files

Previews are very important. Some stores watermark their audio files, share a snippet of the track, or allow one of many tracks to be played for free in order to demonstrate what the rest are like. This often means that an extra file needs to be created which is separate from the original. So for each product file, a preview file must theoretically also be created and made available on the product page. This is often a requirement as customers are reticent to purchase certain types of audio products without first getting a sample. But even if customers are willing to purchase without a preview, adding one is a great way to increase sales and reduce the number of customers who complain after purchase because they expected something different.

An important part of previews is providing prospective customers an easy way to play the file. While you could technically just provide a link to download the preview file, which can be acceptable sometimes, in most cases it is best to include an inline audio player on your site which will allow customers to simply hit the play button while perusing your catalog.

Licensing matters. Not only is it important for you to carefully consider how to license your own products but you must respect others’ licenses when using their works. For example if you are creating a karaoke-ready song you must have permission to use the original song in most cases. Or if you are sprucing up your dramatic reading of your favorite novel with some background sound effects and piano music, unless you created those additions yourself, they are subject to the license terms defined by their creators. If your works are in any way derivative works, you’re subject to any license agreements imposed by the creators of the works you borrowed.

Production quality expectations are high. While there is abundant demand for audio based content and products, customers are definitely expecting to hear highly polished, professionally produced sound. This is especially true for tracks meant for commercial use and most music. Not many audio products can sacrifice quality, though there are definitely some kinds which will not sell unless they’re professional and pristine. Music meant for people to enjoy listening to fits this category and anything less might be worthless. But some other content like live recordings of long form educational lectures and sermons may be able to get away with a lower standard of recording, as long as the message is conveyed clearly.

Audio based businesses have many opportunities to sell other types of products concurrently. If a customer is interested in listening to a song, they might also be interested in the music video or a video demonstrating how the song is played. Or they may be interested in the sheet music for the song or the lyrics or a translation into a foreign language. If a customer enjoys listening to recordings of a speaker pontificating on a given topic, they may be willing to pay for access to further resources on the subject or a complimentary eBook or a transcript of their speeches or to take an online course. In some cases, customers may even be willing to pay for the raw, unmixed files which went into producing a finished product or the project files for software like Pro Tools or Garage Band. Try to think out of the box about what your customers might appreciate in addition to your audio products.

Outro

The market for selling audio based products is exciting right now. Anything with video can be enhanced with audio. Anything text based can have an audio version. Pure audio can be consumed passively which means consumers’ capacity for listening is only limited by their waking hours. That’s a lot of available time! Just think about how many times people could be listening to the catchy song you wrote, or your entertaining podcast, or your powerful motivational speech, or your creative recitation of classic poetry, or your hilarious comedy standup routine. All you need to do is record it and start selling! So, what are you waiting for?

Now it’s your turn! We’ve got this comment form below and are really hoping you’ll chime in. Did we miss anything? Let us know!

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-audio-and-music/feed/41226292Everything you need to know about creating a digital product demohttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-creating-a-digital-product-demo/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-creating-a-digital-product-demo/#commentsTue, 08 May 2018 14:00:32 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1231079You’ve created a digital product and it’s time to make some sales! But first, you need to impress your customers and show them why they need your product.

Selling digital products is largely dependent on buyer confidence to make purchases without ever seeing any physical goods. You not only have to accurately represent your product on your website; you also need to enable buyers to visualize how they could use your product to meet their own goals. How you present your product can make or break the customer experience – and influence your brand reputation as well.

One of the most effective ways you can present your product is with a demo.

Why should you create a demo for your digital product?

Product demos are, of course, not a necessity, but there is one key reason why they are so important for a digital product….

Question: What can you do with a physical product that you can’t do with a digital product?

Answer: Use more of your senses.

Before you purchase a digital product, you can’t touch, taste, smell, and in some cases, hear or see much of what is on offer, until you’ve handed over your cash. You can’t experience the product. This is why a digital product demo is powerful. By engaging the senses you can influence (such as sight and/or sound) and providing a sneak peek, you can showcase your product to focus on the benefits for your customers.

A good digital product demo builds trust and provides customers with a way to experience a taste of what your product can offer them, in all its glory. They get to decide for themselves if the product is a good fit for their needs; in short, it’s your chance to show your customers that they will receive their hard-earned money’s worth!

Think about what you look for when buying a digital product: Is it professional quality? Is it highly rated? Does it have proven results? Features that solve problems? How does it make the user’s life better? These are the things you want to communicate with your demo.

So, what will make your digital product demo successful? That depends on what type of product you’re selling.

In this post we’ve outlined the most effective demo strategies for the 12 most popular digital products to give you the resources you need to make a great digital product demo – and get more sales!

Jump to your digital product type:

1. eBooks

When it comes to eBooks, it’s pretty straightforward: giving away or displaying a free sample excerpt is the tried and true way to go.

Your sample can be as short as a few pages of an introduction, or as long as a full chapter – ideally the first chapter. This gives your audience a chance to properly preview the style and content, while enticing them to purchase the full eBook if they enjoy it. It’s a win-win for everyone!

Export a PDF or EPUB file of your chosen excerpt to give away as a free download on your site, perhaps in exchange for signing up to your mailing list. Alternately, you could provide a web text version or JPEG screenshots for easy display and user-friendly viewing.

You might decide to include the table of contents or a full chapter list so customers can see everything they’re getting. If your eBook contains a lot of images, like photography, recipes, or DIY how-to guides, choose the pages with the most eye-catching images for your sample.

If you really want to go above and beyond, use a program like QuickTime or Camtasia to take a simple screen recording video while you flip through the eBook contents. If you know any video editing, even better – you can add titles and callout features, keeping your eBook demo one step ahead of the game. Video content is highly engaging and can be easily shared on social media.

2. Software

You may choose to release a free version of your program that allows users to explore its basic functionality, reserving certain features, updates, and support for a pro version. In this case, list the limitations of the free version on the demo page to highlight the benefits of getting the pro version. A demo version is similar to a free version, except that it typically restricts basic features like saving and exporting, and usually lives on your website (it’s not downloaded). Either way, this method gives the customer immediate access to everything they need to make a purchase decision.

Or, you might decide to give users a free trial period that automatically times out after 30 days (for example), allowing them to enjoy the full functionality of the software while incentivizing them to retain access thereafter. The more value they get from using your product during this free trial period, the more likely they are to purchase. Remember: your goal is to make sure the customer feels like their questions have been answered, or their problem has been solved by using your software.

The most effective way to demo a plugin is to install it on your own site, creating real-world examples of the plugin’s functionality. Ideally, this would be a demonstration page entirely dedicated to showcasing the different plugin features, with individual pages for each feature, if applicable. Include the full extent of a feature whenever possible; for example, if it’s a purchase-related feature, allow customers to experience what it’s like to go through the entire checkout process.

You could also offer a complete collection of high-resolution screenshots that accurately illustrate your plugin’s functionality. Be sure to include succinct descriptions of any features, links to API documentation, hypothetical or real-world use-case examples, and the ways your plugin will benefit the buyer. For example: “…this add-on will not only make your life as a distributor of products easier, but it will also thrill your customers by allowing them to update their themes and plugins to the latest version with a single click.” Remember to keep screenshots updated as your plugin grows and evolves.

To demonstrate a theme, create a fully functional demo site with your theme installed. Real-time examples of post types, page templates, shortcodes, widgets, and customization options make it easy for customers to see exactly how your theme looks and functions. Do a bit of searching to see how other theme developers demo their products; most tend to showcase the major stand-out features and design elements, with fully functional individual pages for the about section, widgets, templates, shortcodes, blog, and contact forms. Use high-definition stock images and create quality custom demo content and placeholder text if you really want your theme to stand out!

3. Video

Video is the single most engaging type of content on the internet, and it continues to grow rapidly, so it’s no surprise that video previews, trailers, teasers, and sample courses are both captivating and effective for sales. However, with ever-shortening attention spans, increasing competition, and market saturation, you need to figure out how to make your video content cut through the noise, and keep the attention of your customers.

If you produce video content, you’ll already have the tools you need to make a high-quality video preview or trailer to publish on YouTube, Vimeo, or for websites. Now it’s time to focus on delivering your style, main message, and piquing the viewer’s further interest. Modern trends indicate that the most successful trailers deliver only absolutely essential information, engaging the viewer in a matter of seconds with no wasted time. Logos, credits, and links are not always necessary; sometimes, they can even detract from the experience.

Some established YouTubers deliver a personal message at the end of a preview, speaking directly to the camera in a way that their viewers are used to. Depending on your content subject and style, this can add a personal touch and maintain continuity on your channel. If you’re a filmmaker, you can create an engaging featured cover image (or thumbnail) that showcases things like titles, press quotes, and awards. For YouTube videos in general, adding an end card boosts engagement and audience retention – it’s as simple as adding an image to the end of your video that includes call-to-action text, and creating link overlays using the YouTube Creator Studio.

If you sell a video course or tutorial series, why not offer customers an introductory video, or the first video in your series for free? You might decide to speak directly to your viewers, share testimonials, or showcase the measured results of your program with info or motion graphics. Offering exclusive access to a forum, learning community, or support group is also a proven strategy that gets more sales, and works especially well for subscription-based products. Ultimately, customers are more likely to sign up for your full course or tutorial series if they’ve sampled content that is polished and professionally produced – and bonus features help encourage them across the line!

For any of these types of video content, you may want to include things like voiceover, motion graphics, or other animations. Websites like Fiverr are a great place to find these services if you’re on a budget.

Lastly, when it comes to stock video, as we will discuss with stock photos, you’ll want to watermark your videos and present them in a lower-quality format, allowing customers to preview them in their entirety. For the watermark, simply drag a transparent logo into your video editor, or create a new opaque title of your choice, keeping the watermark visible for the entire video. If you’re selling a video bundle, you may want to create an edited video preview that contains multiple short clips of each of your videos, trimmed, edited together, and polished with fade transitions.

4. Audio & music

There’s a wide array of audio and music products, with differing demo strategies for each of them.

If you create soundware, you’ll want to produce a demo featuring your samples, loops, or presets in a flattering style for the genre. You may use multiple styles to highlight the product’s versatility. In this instance, take special care to organize your demo segments in a way that is engaging and pleasant for the listener. Be sure that your demo accurately reflects the content of your product; that means if you detune a sample for your demo (for example), include it in the product itself. Avoid going too heavy on the sample FX, unless you’re going to include those versions as well.

Think about the overall theme of your product and try to give it a beginning, middle, and end, just like you would a song or story. Showcase one of the more engaging, catchy segments at the beginning of the demo to entice the listener, but try to keep the demo captivating throughout, with a fluid, natural progression from one part to the next. Most soundware creators will already be familiar with a specific digital audio workstation (or DAW) like Ableton, Logic Pro X, FL Studio, and the like. However, if you’re someone who makes sample packs exclusively with field recordings, and you don’t produce music, you’ll want to hire a music producer to create a demo for you.

Another popular trick is to release a free “mini pack” of 5-10 samples that your customers can download when they sign up for your newsletter.

To showcase a complete royalty-free music album, you can create a sampler demo that consists of multiple audio snippets from different tracks, trimmed and edited together with smooth fade-ins and fade-outs. For individual royalty-free tracks, backing tracks, and audio logos, audio watermarks are the way to go. An audio watermark protects your work from copyright infringement and unauthorized use, while allowing the listener to experience the full high-quality version.

You can use AG Audio Watermark Generator, Adobe Audition, or similar programs to generate watermarks, or you can record a voiceover watermark yourself and insert it into your track every 10 seconds. Something as simple as the word “preview” can work, although you may want to attribute more information, such as your company name. If you offer multiple length versions, show all of them. Fade-ins and fade-outs keep things clean and polished!

Audiobooks, recorded lectures, and foreign language lessons can be showcased just like eBooks – by giving away a free excerpt, lecture, or sample lesson. This can be as short as 30 seconds or as long as a full 60-minute lecture – it’s up to you. Release your free excerpt in MP3 format for customers to download from your site. You might even add a call to action at the end, such as: “Did you enjoy this sample? Subscribe now to hear the full episode.”

5. Photography

Whether you offer stock photos, independent, or client-commissioned work, the standard is the same: lower-quality watermarked JPEG previews are the best way to allow customers to try out photos in context while protecting your work at the same time.

In this case, a watermark is typically just an opaque image or text that is laid on top of a photo to prevent its unauthorized use. You may decide to use a company logo with a transparent background, or create opaque text including a copyright sign and your company name. Large, dark watermarks tend to be distracting, so stick to white or light gray tones. Applications like Adobe PhotoShop (with the free Watermark CC add-on) and websites like Visual Watermark and Watermarquee make it easy to batch watermark large amounts of photos at once.

If you sell large photo bundles, choose one photo from your bundle and make a featured image graphic with the bundle title and key features, such as categories, styles, and product volume. For smaller bundles, you can create one collage-style image showcasing all (or most) of the photos, making it easy for customers to see exactly what they’re getting. If you add text to your featured image or collage, take care to choose typography that personifies your brand and appeals to your target audience.

6. Graphics & digital art

With graphics and digital art products, the best form of product demo varies depending on what you’re selling.

Let’s say you’re selling Lightroom presets or Photoshop actions. In this case, you could use a program like QuickTime or Camtasia to create a screen recording video illustrating the presets or actions as they are applied to different photos from start to finish. If you’re video savvy, combine this with titles, product highlights, and descriptions of the preset or action properties.

If you offer .PSD templates, make a high-quality PDF, PNG, or JPEG with demo content to showcase your template as it would be used in the real world. Additionally, display any real-world portfolio examples if you have them! What better way to show customers the quality and usability of your product?

You can also demo your printable designs and illustrations with photorealistic product mockups of things like stationery, t-shirts, wall tapestries, art prints, and signage. Vectors, web elements, icons, and finished art pieces are ideally previewed as watermarked JPEGs. As described above, you can find a variety of software and web applications to create your watermarked images. When selling a logo or icon pack or bundle, be sure to create a polished, watermarked mockup so customers can easily see the full collection in high definition!

7. Documents

As for document templates, a demo is exactly that: demo content!

It’s pretty simple. You’ve probably seen the Lorem ipsum passage used before; it’s a common placeholder text that has been used since the 1960s. You can easily find Lorem ipsum text generators online to copy the amount of text you need to fill your document – try Lipsum or Lorem Ipsum. Now you’re ready to display your template to customers with a few high-resolution pages of industry-standard demo content.

For other types of downloadable documents such as manuals and guides, you can give away a few sample pages in PDF format, or provide lower-resolution JPEG screenshots of your document, in whole or in part, and use a text watermark to prevent unauthorized usage. Simply maximize your document to full screen and use your computer’s built-in screenshot functionality to capture your desired display size – for example, a 2 or 4 page view. Easy!

8. Courses

Downloadable and web-based e-Learning courses are in high demand, so use this to your advantage.

Everyone loves free stuff, but even more when it’s really in-demand free stuff! You might give away one free segment of your program, making the value proposition very clear up front: what benefits will your customers receive when they purchase and continue your course? You can also create a video ad that illustrates the course outline and goals, your background and expertise, as well as testimonials and real-world measurable results. This is your chance to highlight all of the best things about your course, but most importantly, the solution that it provides to your customers’ concerns.

If you’re selling memberships or subscriptions to a web-based course, you can offer a risk-free trial period; 3 days, 7 days – it’s up to you. Giving your customers the opportunity to explore your course program first-hand and in-depth is a great way for them to build the trust they need to make a purchase decision. Be sure to include a call-to-action when the trial is up, and you’ve got the perfect demo.

9. Professional services

OK, let’s come at this one from a few angles.

If you already sell downloadables, you can really consider the products themselves as your professional service demos. In this case, you have the opportunity to upsell your services, like customization and tuition, to your existing client base. Since they’re already purchasing your products, they already have consumer confidence. What better way to generate more business than through upselling related services that actually apply to customer needs?

For fixed-price services and custom commissions, the best way to show off your skills is through real-world portfolio examples, testimonials from happy clients (especially notable clients), and product mockups. Don’t be shy when promoting your skills in this way – if your work has created value for others, you deserve the recognition! Your customers will be impressed, too.

One strategy that many people overlook is publishing free “how to” eBooks, guides, or videos related to their skills. This strategy establishes (or expands upon) your authority in a field by giving you credibility as an expert. Hey, if you’re the one who wrote the book (or made the video), you’ve automatically got a leg up on the competition, and a reliable selling point!

10. Tickets

Since tickets are essentially downloaded as “access passes” to specific events (whether online or in person), a successful product demo sells the event itself.

Include a variety of promotional content such as photos and videos of past events, focusing on attendees enjoying themselves. You want to show potential customers that they’re in for a guaranteed good time, with plenty of past evidence to prove it! In addition, reviews, social media buzz, and complete event information (including special guests, sponsors, and related offers) all generate excitement (and more sales)!

If you’re running a new event, create a video sizzle reel or promo video with rich content and information about the event. Use video clips, images, animation, and upbeat music. Keep text to a minimum and use voiceovers if necessary. Knit together the pieces with quality editing software to give your sizzle reel a professional look; try Apple’s iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, or take a look at online options such as Animoto. A word to the wise: a sizzle reel needs to be super sizzly or it will fizzle! Promo material needs to be fun, engaging, and enticing, as well as high quality. Remember, your brand is being portrayed, so if you choose to sizzle, prepare to spend some time cooking up an audiovisual feast.

11. Fonts & typography

When it comes to fonts and typography, you’ll want to showcase your font in different contexts.

On your sales page, display examples of your font in different weights and styles using Lorem ipsum (as mentioned earlier) or other demo text. You can highlight common variations, such as bold headings, light italics, and regular paragraph styles to make it easy for customers to see the options they may be likely to use.

You might decide to publish a demo version of your font in a single weight and style to popular free font sites like DaFont and Font Squirrel to get exposure and generate traffic to your site. This also allows customers to personally try out your font for themselves in context, but disallows them from saving any projects while using the font.

You can also design a stylish mockup that displays your font in its most attractive light – a light and clean sans serif font on an ultra-modern flyer, an extra bold serif font as a restaurant website heading, a beautiful brush script font for a wedding invitation, or a quirky handwritten font on different stationery product mockups, for example.

12. Web-based applications

Web-based applications often utilize the subscription model. This presents the question: Will you offer both free and paid versions, or give customers a trial period instead?

Well, if you want your web app to gain traction quickly, offering a free version is a solid strategy. Naturally, above all else, people find their way to free content, and it’s a great opportunity to show customers the benefits of your product while reserving the more sought-after features for paid users. You could even offer access to the free version in exchange for signing up to your newsletter – this is a tried and true method for building your mailing list!

Alternately, you might offer a trial period of anywhere between 3 and 30 days to give customers a chance to explore your web app in-depth. You could also do both; release a free version and give users a free trial of the paid version. The choice is yours. Whichever method you choose, you can always strengthen your product demo with high-resolution screenshots of key features, quality testimonials, and real-world measurable results.

Another thing to consider is listing an FAQ section on your sales page that answers questions like, “Will I be charged at the end of my trial membership?” Alleviating these concerns upfront helps to give your customers the confidence to try – and hopefully buy!

Bonus tips for digital product demos

Here are a few extra things to consider when you’re deciding how to demo your digital product.

Define your brand voice. Think about how you want your personal brand or business to come across in the demos you create. Do you want to be professional and classy? Or are you more irreverent and fun? Your brand voice can be anything you like, but knowing how you want your brand to be portrayed will help you maintain a consistent style in your demos and communications.

Keep your demo updated. If you decide to create a demo for a “living” product such as software, services, or web-based applications, remember to keep your demo up to date. The last thing you want is to receive emails from unsatisfied customers saying, “Your product didn’t do X or Y!” when that feature was in fact removed in an update 18 months ago.

Focus on benefits, not features. The most compelling demos focus on solving a problem for the visitor/user/potential customer, or inspire them to live a better life if they use the product being demonstrated. Avoid talking only about your features and instead highlight the underlying benefit of how those features address your customers’ needs. What value does your product offer to their lives? Ask questions that address pain points, and then explain how the various aspects of your product answer those questions.

Add a human element. Featuring real people or real customers (if possible) can help to humanize your brand. For example, you might choose to feature a representative of your company in a demo video instead of a voiceover artist (yes, actually show them, their face, their gestures, everything!). This gives a more personal touch and helps to further build trust in your business.

Remember…you know your product best

What makes your product shine? You created it, so you should be confident in the value it has to offer. Tap into this initial inspiration to effectively communicate to your customers that your product is something special. Take inventory of all of the skills, tools, and resources you currently have available to you; product demos are often a time to explore new avenues, and you may end up developing some talents you never knew you had! With DIY trends and growing demands to stay fresh and relevant, there’s never been a better time to try and up your game.

Getting sales isn’t always easy, but the more you put into a polished digital product demo that accurately reflects your product, the more you’ll get back in customer confidence, satisfaction, and loyalty.

Time to showcase your product!

These are just a few ideas to help you make the best product demo for your business. Now you get to have fun creating something that will impress your customers and show off your hard work. The game is always changing and these methods may work better for certain products than others, so don’t be afraid to experiment to see what fits!

Have you already had success with a product demo type not listed here? What methods have you used that work best for your business? Let us know in the comments!

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-creating-a-digital-product-demo/feed/11231079How to optimize your checkout for selling digital productshttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-to-optimize-your-checkout-for-selling-digital-products/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-to-optimize-your-checkout-for-selling-digital-products/#commentsTue, 01 May 2018 14:00:56 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1227448In a previous article we looked at how to approach the cart abandonment problem. This time, we’ll take a deeper dive into one of the root causes of cart abandonment – the checkout process.

The checkout screen is the final piece of the purchase puzzle when visitors come to your site. It’s the very last step before a visitor becomes a customer. It is the culmination of all of your hard work, and is what ultimately puts money in your pocket. Having a slow, painstaking, overly complex checkout page can be the catalyst that results in your customers jumping ship, or rather their cart, and abandoning their purchase. Especially if you’re selling something non-tangible, like digital products or services.

Tweaking your checkout page to better fit the needs of your business, and customers, can have a significant impact on your revenue.

Why do you need to optimize your checkout?

Statistics from the Baymard Institute have shown that 28% of shoppers abandon checkout simply because of a “too long/complicated checkout process”. In a benchmarking study, they also found that the average US checkout flow contains 23.48 form elements shown, with 14.88 of those elements being form fields. Fourteen! By input field #10 customers will be wondering why they bothered with this tedious process, and by input field #14 they’ll be second-guessing their decision to purchase your product.

Take a look at your own website analytics. Where do you see the most visitors bounce from? It’s possible that your checkout page is one of the top pages from which visitors exit your site. Keeping the purchase process as simple as possible can help prevent that last-minute abandonment.

The aim is to make it so easy for customers to complete their purchase, they barely have time to think about it. Let’s look at how you can optimize your checkout to increase your digital product sales.

Keep it honest

When your customers reach the checkout page, the last thing they want to be greeted with are unexpected charges. According to statistics published by the Baymard Institute, taxes and fees that aren’t clearly communicated to customers prior to reaching your checkout page account for 60% of abandoned purchases.

Include any applicable taxes or fees on the product page in a location that is easy to identify. While customers can still feign ignorance, you’ve done your best to prevent any ‘gotcha’ moments when it comes time to checkout. Being upfront with your customers will also help to instill their trust in your business.

Avoid any surprises at checkout by clearly stating any additional costs on the product page.

When the visitor arrives at checkout they are already prepared for any additional costs.

If you have terms and conditions your customers will need to agree to, it’s also a good idea to present them with this information as soon as possible. Giving your customers an opportunity to review this information prior to landing on the checkout page is another way to eliminate unwanted surprises.

Keep it simple

This is the category where selling digital products really shines! Unlike an eCommerce business that sells physical products, digital products that are available instantly don’t require a shipping address or phone number. Street address, state, and zip code, are all fields you can immediately eliminate from your checkout form.

With each field you add to your checkout page you’re increasing the amount of time it takes a customer to give you money. You may also be increasing the fear and doubts a customer has regarding their purchase. Customers may find themselves wondering why you’re asking for their phone number, and just what you plan to do with it once you have it.

When configuring your checkout page, you’ll also want to review the order of your required fields. The email address should be one of the first pieces of information collected. By collecting the email address first, you’re able to target customers later if their cart is abandoned. Only show fields that are absolutely required.

The less a customer has to do, the more likely they are to complete a purchase. Keeping your checkout form simple and free of clutter is an easy way to put your customers at ease while they breeze through the checkout process.

Distraction-free design

As for the visual impact of your checkout page, you should remove everything that is not necessary. This same rule applies if you have a regular page or a pop-up/modal window.

Get rid of your primary (and secondary) navigation, remove your footer, remove any unnecessary images and overwhelming bright colours. Think clean and concise. Get straight to the point with your checkout form. Here’s a quick list of the basic elements you can include on a distraction-free checkout page:

Show your logo or your brand/business name at the top (so the customer remembers where they are)

Show the customer their cart contents one more time and the total price

(Optional: allow them to enter a discount code or coupon if this is part of your pricing or marketing strategy)

Add form fields to collect any personal details you need that are required for the purchase. At this point you can allow the user to log into an existing account, register a new account, or complete the purchase as a guest.

Add form fields to collect the relevant payment information. Add fields for credit card details or provide details for other payment options you offer (such as bank transfer, third-party services such as PayPal, cryptocurrency, etc.)

Provide a checkbox so the customer can accept your website’s terms and conditions

And finally place a button at the bottom of the form that clearly explains the action the customer is about to take, such as “Purchase” or “Complete payment”.

Keep it secure

Collecting and maintaining personal data provided by your customers is a monumental responsibility. When a visitor is shopping on your site, and providing private information, they want to feel safe. A secure site not only puts your customers at ease; it can also help you convert more visitors into customers.

Trusted payment logos and trust badges / seals (if applicable) should be displayed prominently on your checkout page, along with accepted forms of payment. Displaying these images to your customers will increase their sense of security and trust in your site.

Savvy shoppers know to look for these visual cues and won’t complete a purchase on a site without them. If you don’t see a padlock in the address bar, and if your URL doesn’t start with https, you may be losing sales due to a lack of security.

Having an SSL certificate is like scrambling up your customers personal information and storing it in a safe. This makes the data that much more difficult for a third party to obtain and translate. If you’re accepting onsite payments, an SSL certificates is also required for PCI compliance.

We display a trust seal within the EDD checkout to further reassure users that our website is secured with an SSL certificate.

If your site isn’t secure, reach out to your hosting provider to learn about the available options. Trust me, your customers will thank you for it.

Keep it personal

Should you allow guest checkouts or require registration? This is an important question you’ll need to ask yourself and there is no right or wrong answer. The option you choose will vary greatly based on the type of products or services you sell. For some stores and product types, account creation may be a huge barrier to purchase.

Do you run a membership site with exclusive content? If so, your customers will be required to create an account to access all the premium material your site offers. Do you sell handcrafted coloring pages? Then customer registration may not be a necessity.

One way to encourage account registration is with an incentive. Offer a discount or a unique benefit if they choose to register an account. This makes the user feel less like they are signing up to yet another website, and they are getting something from the registration. It also means they are providing their permission to (securely) store the details they provide on your website.

Evaluate the products you sell and how your customers will interact with them, and your site, after they complete a purchase. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Regardless of the option you choose, the process should be easy for your customers to navigate.

Keep it fast

Images and animations make your site visually appealing to visitors, but they can also make it slower. Increasing the number of components on your checkout page will result in increased load times and reduced customer satisfaction. They’re also completely irrelevant at this point. Eliminate distraction by removing unnecessary features from your checkout page, and stick to the basics. Don’t make your potential customer question their cart contents with unnecessary fluff.

A fast, simple checkout will also be significantly easier to use on mobile devices. Remember that more and more transactions are taking place on mobile devices, and a clunky mobile checkout might send a potential customer off to a competitor’s site. When resized on a desktop or used at a mobile or tablet resolution, your checkout should be tap-friendly and fast-loading. Take care with button sizing and input fields to ensure purchasing is a pain-free process.

You’ve already dazzled your customers with your products and services, now it’s time to get them across the finish line.

Finally, keep the faith

Regardless of how simple, safe, or speedy your checkout process is, it’s inevitable potential customers will still abandon their carts.

Converting visitors into customers while they’re still on your site will yield a better return than trying to wrangle them back in after they’ve left. While you aren’t likely to have a low inventory of digital products, you can still create a sense of urgency, or FOMO, at checkout. Offering customers an exclusive discount at checkout is one way to keep your customers engaged.

If customers do abandon their carts, all hope is not lost. Shopping cart recovery emails can be used to gently remind your potential customers that their items are still available and waiting for them to return. Offering a discount code in cart recovery emails will also increase the odds of a successful purchase.

Check out your checkout & recognize where to optimize

Optimizing your checkout process will help increase revenue, and customer satisfaction. While there are numerous ways to achieve this, some will fit your business needs better than others. Navigate your checkout process as a customer to identify potential sticking points. Was it simple? Was it fast? As a customer, would you be wowed by the experience? Test various changes to find the one that best suits your business.

What steps have you taken to optimize your checkout? Have you made changes that have improved sales? Which trust badges are you using? Drop us a comment and let us know!

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-to-optimize-your-checkout-for-selling-digital-products/feed/11227448Selling Serviceshttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-services/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-services/#commentsTue, 24 Apr 2018 14:00:46 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1222873Running an eCommerce business requires knowledge of market demands. The type of eCommerce business you are running determines how unique those demands may be. When selling services to individuals, every detail matters.

Unlike selling digital or physical products online, selling services may force person-to-person interaction. The perfect experience for one client could be a nightmare for the next.

As a service provider, especially online, you will need to take things like marketing, pricing, and even methods of communication with clients into consideration. Why would a potential client choose you over others? Will clients expect to pay more (or less) simply because their purchases are custom? Is email correspondence sufficient?

Let’s talk about things you can do to make the experience a pleasant one for both you and your clients.

State your case

First of all, who are you? From browsing your website for a minute or two, I have a general idea of the services you intend to provide, but why should I pay you for those services? What makes you any different, or better, than my other options?

This is arguably the most important statement you can make when selling services online. Whether you are a one-person show, or you have a team of dedicated professionals ready to serve the market, clients will always want to know exactly who they will be dealing with.

There are several ways to make this clear before any interaction with the client. We’ll go over a few of them.

About page

Over the past decade or so, About pages — pages that describe what a particular website or business is “about” — have become so standard that they are often neglected. It is not uncommon for an eCommerce business selling software, a different business selling custom t-shirts, and another providing life coaching sessions to have similarly formatted About pages.

To be frank, I do not care where you were born if I am purchasing your software. Likewise, I’d love to know if meeting with you and your team in person is possible before I commit to paying you for unique services. Are you local?

When crafting an About page for selling services online, think about how your service could yield very specific questions and concerns from clients. Use the About page to answer those questions before the potential client has to ask. Give thought to what is relevant and what isn’t.

This doesn’t mean you can’t provide an extra touch of information and personality. In fact, I suggest that you do. Just remember to cover what is needed.

Marketing

Depending on the type of service you are selling, you may have more marketing options than the typical eCommerce business.

Tell me, when was the last time you saw a stack of random business cards near the checkout counter at a local business? Depending on the service you provide, the customers at your local Starbucks could very well be your potential clients.

Be sure not to focus only on digital marketing if you are selling a service online, especially services that could be discussed over coffee. The fact that you are local could very well be your unique selling proposition.

Brainstorm ways to expand your marketing strategy so that it targets online viewers as well as those offline.

Portfolio and social proof

Would you rather I tell you that I am an excellent massage therapist, or have your best friend tell you that I am an excellent massage therapist? I think it’s safe to assume that your best friend will share with you a more relatable review of my services than I would. That’s not because I am dishonest, but because my opinion is based on my intended performance, not my actual performance.

Having some sort of portfolio, display of testimonials, public client reviews, or other form of proof that you provide quality services can go a long way. It gives potential clients and past clients the opportunity to have a “discussion” about you, without your input.

Of course, you as the business owner will always have the ability to organize client feedback in a favorable way, at least on your website. But allowing potential clients to determine how much they trust the judgment of your past clients is a way to remove yourself from the equation.

Everything we’ve discussed so far is part of your introduction. At this point, potential clients haven’t even contacted you yet. How you introduce yourself has the ability to secure clients before you even know they exist.

Expectation management

One of the most difficult parts of selling services online is establishing boundaries with your clients and sticking to those boundaries. It requires you to be assertive, yes. But it also requires your clients to have a clear understanding of why they chose you.

Your website should make clear what services you provide. Whether it be from a “Services” page, the implications of your portfolio material, the description of your pricing (more on pricing later), or a combination of them all.

The goal is to communicate to clients exactly what you have to offer before the transaction begins. This can save you from stress later on as you provide the service.

Description of services

Much like an About page, a Services page should be tailored to your business. This seems obvious, but the tone and verbiage used on this page can be the difference between a smooth experience and a disaster.

On your Services page, avoid leaving much to the imagination (unless imagination is a unique component of your business). For instance, take a look at the following example of what you might find on the Services page for web development agency:

Our website designs will make you look like a rock star to your visitors!

This type of rhetoric is fun, and sometimes exciting. But it doesn’t mean anything and leaves too much to the imagination. While there is a place for this type of excitement, it should not be the basis for describing what services you provide.

Consider this description of web development services instead:

We follow the latest coding standards to ensure your website is not only fast and easy to navigate, but also optimized for the most popular search engines. Furthermore, our designs are responsive, meaning your website will look professional on any browsing device, from desktop computers to mobile phones.

While that description isn’t overly technical, it makes clear that the agency intends to provide a service that is [most likely] beyond the abilities, and possibly the understanding, of the client. Furthermore, the revised description is also less subjective and geared more towards an agreed upon standard rather than an opinion.

Describe your services in a clear and concise manner to help establish accurate expectations.

Pricing

We won’t go into detail about how to price your services. There are too many factors like what kinds of services you provide, your reputation, market research, and much more. What we will discuss is thoroughly communicating what your pricing includes.

Oftentimes, providing a service begets maintaining a relationship. In fact, client retention may be a part of your business model. Even if it isn’t, how you charge for a service should have a clearly defined starting point, any subsequent payments, and an end point if applicable.

In addition to the payment structure, you must express exactly what is being paid for.

Keeping with the web development agency example, a common occurrence when providing web development services is site maintenance and adjustments after the services have been completed. For those with experience in this field or similar fields, you have most likely suffered through a situation where the client does not understand that your services have been fully rendered, and additional work is to be considered a new transaction.

There are ways to combat this in a preventative manner using your website.

Pricing details

If/when you display pricing on your website, clearly define what your pricing includes. If two adjustments to the delivered product are permitted, state that. If copy writing is not included in the price of web design, state that as well.

It’s easier to succinctly express what your service does provide than it is to tell an already-paying client what you will not do.

Terms Agreement

I am a firm believer in asking clients to explicitly agree to a set of terms before providing a service. These terms should be displayed on a dedicated page or section of your website, regardless of the fact that your pricing already describes your service.

Whether or not you require the client to check a box and submit a form on your website, or even sign an actual paper or digital contract, is completely up to you. Just remember that leaving “room to wiggle” will almost guarantee excess wiggling.

Project management

Promote open and direct communication for the duration of the project. It helps to reiterate the specific details of the service you are providing while the project is ongoing.

Consider adding a component to your website that facilitates project management. There are hundreds of project management software scripts that can be built directly into your website. Or, consider a third party system like Basecamp. The goal is to be transparent, keep the communication flowing, and make sure there are no misunderstandings about how the services you provide accurately satisfy the pricing.

Never underestimate a client’s ability to make assumptions about the service you provide. Manage expectations by thoroughly describing your service and pricing details.

Return on investment

Too often, service providers focus only on receiving payment for services rendered. Money pays the bills, but credibility keeps the clients coming. Take advantage of the opportunity to get more out of your clients than just paid invoices.

Because paying for a service is a more personal experience than purchasing a digital or physical product, clients are oftentimes more excited about what you have done for them (assuming you did great work).

Use tools like surveys and questionnaires to get feedback from your clients. Not only does this let them know that you care, but it also gives you the information needed to improve the experience for future clients.

You can also request testimonials, either through the survey or directly, and use those testimonials to enhance your social proof.

Sure, this is something that all eCommerce businesses can do to get feedback from customers and improve future marketing efforts. But remember, it is especially important for those selling services online as you may need to do a little more convincing to a potential client than you would to a potential customer who never intends to interact with you directly.

The verdict

The experience of selling services online can be an intricate mix between today’s disconnected, digital way of life and a more personal, intimate interaction between two [or more] people. It’s up to you to understand how your services craft the expectations of your clients, and what you need to do to meet those expectations.

Use your website to set yourself and your business apart from others while also communicating information that matters to potential clients. Then use the experience gained from selling services to better understand future client needs and desires.

Perhaps you’ve learned other lessons from selling services online? If so, drop a comment down below. Or feel free to ask questions!

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-services/feed/21222873The greatest gift you can give a child is an imaginationhttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-eddge-customer-showcase-mindtv/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-eddge-customer-showcase-mindtv/#respondThu, 19 Apr 2018 14:00:07 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1201062“If you can visualize it, you can remove it.” That’s what the founders of mindTV believe when it comes to the scary, stressful, and sad feelings that kids can experience. And helping kids is their purpose.

Sonya Mosimann and Chris Luescher, founders of mindTV, reside in a Swiss town near Zurich with Sonya’s two kids. Her children were healthy and happy, but things took a turn suddenly when her son started having trouble fitting in at school, and his behavior started to change. Noticing that this was out of the ordinary, Sonya sought out professionals to try and help define the underlying issue with very little success.

Through the need to help her own son, Sonya learned that other parents were facing the same issue. Realizing that existing therapy methods weren’t helping both her son or other kids, she became a children’s therapist herself. Over time, and through thousands of sessions with kids, it became increasingly clear that a child’s imagination was an incredibly powerful tool.

Sonya developed visualization methods to help children use their imagination to turn bad feelings into objects and remove them from their life. She wanted to pass this information on to other people so they could also help kids with negative and troubling feelings. And thus, mindTV was born.

Sonya shares a story on the mindTV website; “It started with a six year old boy. When I was working with him I asked him to tell me about his feelings and he said, ‘What do you mean feelings?’ I said, ‘You know, the bad feelings.’ I even tried to change my voice to explain it to him. Every angle I came at, he said he didn’t know. All of the sudden I had this idea, ‘Okay I’m going to ask him to go see what the feeling looks like,’ and the funny thing was that straight away he knew exactly where it is, exactly what the color is. I thought this was brilliant and maybe now that he knows what it looks like, we can go back and see where it all started.”

Instead of verbally describing the challenges or feelings that the child might be harboring, Sonya coaxed the child to visualize the feeling into an object and trace it back to the original manifestation. Then, by properly identifying the issue and working up the timeline she would ask the child to throw away the object, thus effectively removing the issue and enriching their life. Essentially, creating TV in the child’s mind.

“I work with the imagination of your child to turn his worries into objects – and remove them permanently.”

Over the course of five years, Sonya perfected her method. Recognizing there was a need in their community to help other children, Chris helped Sonya structure the knowledge she wanted to share into a professional training program.

With the intention of educating coaches, therapists, and providing schools with these resources, mindTV needed a solid platform to get their digital business rolling. With Chris’ background in business, and his experience with building hundreds of WordPress-based websites, he knew that a simple, effective platform would help them distribute this knowledge to their target audience. For this reason, they choose Easy Digital Downloads as their digital eCommerce foundation.

Chris recounted his first experience building a website using EDD, and how it changed his perception of web development, and ultimately, his career. “It was the moment I realized I wanted to build my own company instead of working for clients. So, when I kept reading emails from parents, teachers and doctors, thanking Sonya for what she had done for them, I realized, this was our chance. And here we are, years later, with tons of experience and finally, a promising business that actually makes a real difference.”

When explaining why EDD was the right fit for them, he starts, “Since we are planning long-term, it was crucial to us that the software we run comes from a company that also plans to be around for a while.”

“As interested readers of Pippin’s yearly reviews, and having followed him for years, it was an easy decision to go with EDD. In fact, in all our planning, we even made sure that our concept would always be tailored to fit the EDD features.”

Chris continues with his reasoning; “Experience has shown it’s best to go with premium players in the WordPress world. They keep their plugins up to date, ensure best possible compatibility, invest into security and provide support.”

“As a business, we really have this gut feeling, that if at any point, something would really go wrong, EDD would be there to help.”

mindTV primarily offers training courseware for therapists. By utilizing a handful of EDD extensions such as Content Restriction, Recurring Payments, Multilingual, Stripe Payment Gateway, Manual Purchases, and Downloads As Services, they were able to tailor a store to suit their current market, but also structured to handle a wider range of customers as they grow.

Chris opted to use Content Restriction easily control access of training material to all paying customers. When speaking of their pricing model, he explained, “After careful evaluation, we chose to go with a simple one-time fee instead of monthly or yearly subscriptions. Also, we opted not to drip. The client pays once and has unlimited access immediately. So, we run EDD with the Content Restriction add-on.”

Since mindTV’s products are currently geared for professionals, the course materials might be a little pricey for those on a budget. The mindTV website uses Recurring Payments to offer payment plans and currently 20% of clients have opted for this payment option. And for those clients wishing to pay through their banks, Manual Purchases resolves this issue. These curated extensions make a significant difference to the bigger picture when offering payment options to new clients.

“One of the most troubling downsides of being a non-coder and running digital platforms is dependency on developers. With every customization, this dependency grows. With EDD we were able to build everything without a single line of custom code.”

mindTV is still young. Launched in January of 2017, they have established a solid foundation in their home market of Switzerland, and also Germany. When we spoke to Chris recently, over 160 trainees had sign up to their courses. Since launch, they’ve earned over $240,000 USD selling their courses on their website. Excluding salaries, operation costs come to around 20%. And they’ve barely scraped the surface of their potential global audience.

Now, they’re preparing to bring their program to the English-speaking world and other countries where they’ve already established relationships, such as Brazil. The Multilingual extension works wonders by allowing them to run the entire platform in multiple languages and sell to all corners of the world. Their main goal, however, is to create products that will benefit families in the home, and teachers at schools, with big things happening later in 2018.

When asked how they define success, it’s clear in the overwhelmingly positive feedback they receive on what they have created.

“Success is…

When practitioners share their most touching stories.
When parents call to thank us for the changes in their children’s lives.
When children even years later send drawings and postcards of gratitude.
When practitioners call mindTV the best investment they have ever made.

Success is when something we have worked so hard to create, is making a huge difference in the lives of practitioners, parents and kids.”

mindTV’s success is also remarkable. Once, they almost had a refund request, but that customer later booked a session with Sonya and was so happy that she went home and signed up again. Although it is impossible to prevent a refund 100% of the time, this proves that if a course exceeds expectations and delivers the results it promises, only rarely will someone ask for their money back.

Chris told us, “All of this would not have been possible without EDD. So, in some way, all of our success is somewhat connected to yours.” We’re honored that Easy Digital Downloads has helped mindTV springboard their unique vision, and we’re excited to watch their continued growth and accomplishments.

A wise character known as Spongebob Squarepants once said, “Squidward, we don’t need a television. Not as long as we have our imagination.” With mindTV methods, kids can use their imagination to make television in their minds, and learn how to remove bad thoughts and feelings to enjoy a mentally healthy childhood. From a deeply personal need, to a now thriving business, Sonya and Chris are fearlessly driving mindTV into the future.

Do you have a story like mindTV’s? Send us an email at support@easydigitaldownloads.com and tell us how Easy Digital Downloads gives you The EDDge!

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-eddge-customer-showcase-mindtv/feed/01201062Selling Softwarehttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-software/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-software/#commentsTue, 17 Apr 2018 14:00:21 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1216799When it comes to selling digital products, software is an entirely unique beast. Over the last 6 years we’ve seen many of our users succeed with selling software products, and learned a few things ourselves.

It should come as no surprise that myself and everyone else at Easy Digital Downloads has a passion for creating and selling software. It’s what we do. In fact, this entire business exists because years ago, a young fellow from Kansas made some software in his spare time and then wanted a better way to sell it. Today, we’re a growing team focused on selling our own software and helping others sell theirs.

Is creating a software product something you are thinking about? Here’s what you should know first:

Pricing

Unlike eBooks, software varies greatly when it comes to pricing. There are software products costing many thousands of dollars, and there are countless applications available for no cost at all. However, when looking within specific segments of the software industry, some standardization does exist.

Mobile apps

Mobile apps are very similar to eBooks in that free apps are common and pricing is typically very low. The majority of mobile apps are sold on marketplaces which strongly influence the pricing decisions. Customers have been well trained to expect either free or only a few dollars for most apps. However, many apps are generating significant revenue through the use of in-app purchases instead of, or in addition to, an up-front cost.

WordPress-specific software

WordPress has become a proven platform for extending with commercial products, particularly plugins and themes. A theme provides a layout and visual aesthetic to a WordPress site, and plugins introduce new functionality. Our business is based on selling WordPress plugins, and many of our customers do so as well, so this is a practice we are intimately familiar with and also strongly believe in. When it comes to pricing, WordPress themes, when sold commercially, are most commonly priced between $19 and $99. Plugins vary a lot more with many starting at as little as $9, especially simple plugins on large marketplaces. Higher-priced, individual plugins can cost as much as several hundred dollars.

Desktop software

Desktop software is a broad category and as such, pricing varies quite a lot. Many free programs exist, as do low-cost, standalone products or upgraded premium versions of free apps. There are also many desktop applications with their own ecosystem of free and paid add-ons, very similar to how WordPress works. On the high end, there are popular consumer programs which cost in the low thousands, but business software, especially for enterprise level customers, is really where prices tend to jump with no clear ceiling.

Web-based software

Web-based apps are also rising in popularity, and for good reason. They are still fundamentally software like all the rest except they are not distributed. I’ll cover distribution later but that is the primary differentiator for apps run solely within a web browser. Web apps, broadly speaking, can be found at virtually any price. Usually sold on a subscription based model, they tend to appeal to sellers as long term earners, provided enough value can be continuously delivered to retain customers. Many web-based apps are offered with both free and paid plans. Paid plans can be as little as a few dollars per month up to thousands.

In general, if your software is serving businesses (B2B) you can reasonably expect to charge more than if your software targets consumers (B2C). In fact many software sellers provide variations on their software with the simpler version being labeled “personal” or “individual” while the more robust version is called “business” or “professional”. Businesses are significantly more likely to have an expectation to pay for your product and also to have bigger budgets available.

Important lesson: For our business, we’ve learned to appreciate the fact that pricing will need to change over time. We have made adjustments to our prices and pricing models numerous times over the years and will continue to do so. When making pricing decisions, remember that you don’t need to be deciding how to price your products from now to the end of time. Focus only on what prices and models make sense now and recognize that you will be changing it down the road.

Ongoing revenue

Software is highly conducive to recurring models. This is because all programs are susceptible to bugs and have opportunities for improvement. These ongoing changes mean customers who’ve obtained a software product will likely need to receive updates to the application from the provider at a later date if they continue using it. This continuous cycle of iterations and updates lends itself to repeatable transactions between user and developer. Charging customers repeatedly for software which is being improved makes sense and is mostly commonplace. Exceptions do exist when code-based products are distributed “as is”, for example most HTML templates are sold for a one time price.

In the past, I’ve witnessed firsthand many businesses start up without fully appreciating the importance of charging customers on a recurring basis, and ultimately either change their model or cease operations as a result. This is because the user base continues to grow but revenues don’t so a critical mass of customers is reached and the business begins to break down. Establishing some kind of recurring model is important for most software based businesses.

As an illustration of this need, imagine selling an app for $100 and getting 100 customers per year. Each year, you’d be earning $10,000 and adding 100 more customers. You may be able to run your business just fine in year one when you only have 100 customers to support. But after year five you’ll have 500 customers while still only earning $10,000. You want to hire more help but you can’t. If your customers were paying routinely, revenue would increase each year and you’d be able to scale up your resources.

Without recurring revenue, it’s conceivable that we would no longer be in business. It is that important for businesses like ours which offers some support and ongoing updates for customers. This is not as crucial for businesses which do not offer any ongoing support or updates. If your business provides any kind of ongoing service whatsoever, consider recurring revenue a requirement. If not, consider it anyway!

Distribution

In the good old days, software was typically distributed on physical disks such as floppies and CD-ROMs. That practice is pretty much behind us and almost all software is now downloaded from the web. While this means that my kids probably won’t experience the thrill of unwrapping the latest version of Madden for PC on Christmas morning like I did fifteen years ago, it does mean the experience of finding → purchasing → downloading → installing → using a product is much faster and easier today.

If you have a software product and wish to distribute it, there are numerous options available, each with their own pros and cons. Here are a few choices:

Host the code in a public repository. If you’re not planning to sell the software to paying customers, you can create a repository on sites like GitHub.com or SourceForge.net. It may sound implausible but there are many cases in which this makes business sense, for example when charging customers for services based around software like installing or configuring. Or when the distributed software includes upsells to other products like a pro version or complimentary products sold elsewhere.

Sell on a marketplace. Dedicated marketplaces exist for all kinds of software. Mobile platforms have dedicated app stores and everything from Python scripts to video game mods to web browser extensions to screensavers and just about anything else you can think of likely can be sold on a relevant online marketplace. If you are not interested in building your own brand, managing your relationship with your customers, and doing a lot of your own marketing, marketplaces are an easy, convenient way to enter the market and get your product in the hands of customers.

Sell on your own site. For maximum control and flexibility, creating your own eCommerce site is the way to go. You’ll avoid paying commissions to a marketplace and will have the freedom to experiment with your pricing, market your offering any way you want, engage customers directly, and establish yourself as a recognized brand.

Sell directly to enterprise customers. If this is your first foray into commercial software, it’s unlikely that you will be targeting large scale businesses but it is worth noting that other distribution channels do exist. Some software cannot be added to a virtual cart and downloaded online. Some of the more complex proprietary software involves sales reps, live demos, and many more zeros on the price tag. If you pursue selling software to hospitals and banks you may encounter an expectation for high prices, personal interactions, and hands on integration projects.

Selling distributed software also means that it is necessary to really understand how customers will be using it and in what kinds of environments. For example, Jeff Gould from WP Migrate DB Pro has this to say about selling WordPress plugins:

You have very little control over the environment that your code will eventually run in. WordPress is deployed on all sorts of different hosting providers that might land your code on a IIS server running PHP 5.3 and a 10-year old release of MySQL or a Caddy server running PHP 7.2 and the latest release of MariaDB. This means that you have to code for the lowest common denominator while trying to provide a good, stable experience across the board.Jeff Gould

We have made the decision to self-distribute our software for a number of reasons. First of which is the fact that enabling this is exactly what our software does! But apart from that, it makes it possible for us to:

Build our own brand

Engage our customers directly without a third party in-between

Keep all the money we earn instead of paying commissions to a third party

Have full control over the experience our customers have

Avoid the risk of our business suffering because of the rules enforced or actions taken by a third party

Maintain full responsibility for our customers’ satisfaction.

If those factors are important to you, self-distribution might be way to go. If not, there are definitely other viable options.

Other considerations

Support

In the vast majority of cases, support for a software product will be an important factor. Even very simple products will inevitably have occasional pre-sale questions from customers and the occasional user who tries to install it somewhere or some way that you never anticipated. Rigorous testing, intuitive interfaces, and thorough documentation can reduce support requests but they can never be truly eliminated entirely. If you have customers, you will have support tickets.

Licensing

Before putting your software in the hands of other people, it is important to decide what you want to allow users to do with it. Can they use it forever? Can they modify it? Can they share it with others? Can they resell it? It’s a good idea to read about the differences between proprietary and open source licenses. Deciding how permissive or restrictive to be with your licensing terms can be difficult. However, many segments of the software industry have some standards which can guide you, so start by looking at related applications already in existence.

We’ve chosen to license all of our software under the General Public License (GPL) which is the same license that WordPress uses. Since our products are built on top of WordPress and because we strongly believe in open source, this is an obvious choice. If you’re selling open source software you might consider the GPL but other licenses like MIT and Apache are common too.

User verification

Anything digital can be pirated and redistributed without your authorization. For this reason, it is usually necessary to implement some means of verifying that customers are legitimate before assisting them with support requests or allowing them to access updated versions of your product. Issuing license keys to users at the time of purchase is a common solution. Licenses can also come with limitations such as the number of installations.

If you offer any ongoing support and updates for your customers, you’ll need to verify somehow that they have legitimately obtained your product before spending your valuable time assisting them. This can be as simple as asking them to provide some proof of purchase like a payment receipt or it can be more sophisticated and automatic like a license key system. When our customers seek technical support from us, they are required to provide their license key first. Our ticketing system then checks the key and shows our support staff an indication of whether the customer is valid or not.

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Software is a big industry. Many of the decisions made when building a software business will be influenced by the standards and expectations within the relevant segment of the industry. Student grading desktop software for elementary schools will likely require a different model than brain puzzle games for iPads. Anti-virus software will need a different approach to data analysis web apps for eCommerce stores, or flight simulation programs for jet pilots. Study your market before choosing how to structure your business and sell your products. But don’t be afraid to shake things up! Sometimes bucking the status quo can be a way to differentiate yourself and discover even better opportunities.

Are you selling software? What advice or questions do you have based on your own experiences? Leave a comment below!

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-software/feed/51216799The reality of refunds for digital productshttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-reality-of-refunds-for-digital-products/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-reality-of-refunds-for-digital-products/#commentsTue, 10 Apr 2018 14:00:31 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1219982Whether you’re starting a new eCommerce business, or you’ve been up-and-running successfully for years, refunds are an unavoidable fact of life.

It’s a fairly straightforward process when you need to return that new pair of Chuck Taylors you purchased because they just aren’t your jam. You return the shoes to the retailer and the retailer returns your money. Even-steven.

However, in this article we’re going to look at what happens when a refund is requested for a digital product. What happens when you’ve sold an eBook to a reader who suddenly realizes they were actually looking for a thrilling mystery series, and not a steamy romance novel?

Confusion. Frustration. Anger. Disappointment. Panic.

These are all feelings you could have. When you’ve put countless hours into a product you’re selling, that refund request can pack a mighty punch in the gut. But it doesn’t have to, and it shouldn’t!

Repeat after me: Refunds are an unavoidable fact of life. The sooner you accept this as fact, the sooner you can learn how to handle them like a pro.

Common reasons refunds are requested

“Too small. Too big. Wrong color. Wrong item. I don’t even remember ordering this!” These are just a few of the reasons cited when consumers return physical products and request a refund.

When exploring why refunds are requested for digital products, none of those explanations are fitting. When refunds are requested on digital products it’s usually because of one of the following reasons:

The customer changed their mind or decided the product was no longer required

These are just a few of the refund request reasons you might encounter. But, wait just a minute there… what happens to the actual product?

The unique nature of refunding digital products

When a refund is requested on the purchase of a physical product, the product is returned and the money refunded. However when a refund is requested for a digital product, there isno way for the customer to truly return the purchased item. It remains in their possession indefinitely.

While that can be a daunting scenario, especially if your eCommerce business is in its infancy, there are ways to lessen the uneasiness you may be feeling:

Structure your business around providing extra capabilities and features when a customer completes a purchase. Extra capabilities and features that will no longer be available if a refund is issued.

If you sell software, by offering support or access to updates you can increase customer satisfaction, discourage refund requests, and help prevent fraud.

If you sell photos or graphics, you could choose to only allow a certain amount of images to be downloaded per month.

If you sell courses or a series of eBooks, you could set them up as membership levels that can only be unlocked after prior courses or books have been purchased.

If you run a membership site one of your terms will likely be that access to content is revoked when a refund is issued. Be sure to clearly outline the terms of membership upfront so customers aren’t surprised further down the road.

Refund statistics

While there hasn’t been much research conducted on the topic of refunds for digital products, we are happy to share some fast facts we’ve seen for Easy Digital Downloads over the last year.

Over the last 12 months, in terms of number of sales, around9% of all completed sales were later refunded. In dollars, that’s about 10% worth of revenue refunded. These figures include new purchases and renewals. (Bear in mind that software is a different beast to other digital products, so your refund rate might be very different to ours.)

In the past, like many other digital product sellers, we tried to save almost every refund request we received. Terrified by the impact it would have on our business and our bottom line, we’d go back and forth with customers attempting to resolve their not-easily-or-quickly-resolved issues. This resulted in unnecessary stress for our team, and our customers were unhappy with the drawn-out process. Not OK. Those refund statistics might sting if this is your first digital store rodeo, but at the end of the day, there are two key things to remember:

Say it with me again… Refunds are an unavoidable fact of life.

Your reputation can make or break your business.

We would much rather our ex-customers walk away happy with how we resolved their request, than drag it out and make it a painful, rant-worthy experience for all parties.

Why you should provide refunds

While establishing a fair and reasonable refund policy will give customers peace of mind, it may also cause some anxiety for shop owners. But having a strict “No Refunds” policy may actually cause more problems, and expenses, than it alleviates.

I encourage you to provide refunds on digital products. They not only help protect your customers, but they do have some often overlooked benefits for your business:

Having a fair and reasonable refund policy can help you stand out from your competitors that don’t offer refunds.

I’ll bet part of what drives you as a business owner is providing high-quality products to your customers while making a profit. Knowing that customers can, and will, request a refund for subpar products might be the extra motivation you need to crank through that latest new product or extra feature.

Providing customers with a hassle-free refund experience means the customer will walk away feeling good about your swift handling of the situation, and it will reflect positively on your business (there’s no better advertising than word-of-mouth advertising!). Because of a satisfactory outcome, they may return in the future if their needs change.

Chargebacks are a nightmare. If you refuse to issue a refund, your customers may take matters into their own hands and dispute the charge with PayPal, Stripe, or whichever payment processor you use. This can result in a lot of wasted time and expenses on your part.

The anatomy of a refund

Start with a clear refund policy

Having a refund policy that meets the needs of your business, and your customers, means everyone can walk away from the purchase feeling satisfied. Make sure your refund policy is easily identifiable on your website and clearly outlines your terms. A good refund policy should include:

Timeframe. How many hours or days notice do you require from date of purchase?

Non-refundable products. Are you selling any products that are non-refundable? Be sure this is clearly stated in your terms and on the product page.

Consequences. Once the refund is issued, what happens next? Customers may lose access to support, certain downloads, your content, or future updates.

How to request a refund. All of the above information won’t be helpful to a customer if they don’t know how to contact you. Include a link to your support form or the appropriate email address to simplify the process.

Simply refund the purchase, or try and save the sale?

Refund requests are not all bad! More often than not, they allow you to identify what customers are looking for, what they didn’t find with your product, and what can be improved upon.

In some cases, a refund request may be due to a simple misunderstanding of what services or features are available. If someone opens a refund request because they think you didn’t include something they needed, but you actually do have that feature or product available, they might just need to be pointed in the right direction. In these instances you can save the sale.

Many customers will be very clear as to why they’d like a refund when the request is initiated. If a customer fails to provide you with this information it’s OK to ask, “Could you tell me what you didn’t like about the product you purchased?” But when doing so, you’ll also want to state that you’ll gladly issue the refund. Customers may mistake your genuine interest as a way of getting out of the refund.

Be willing to make exceptions to the rule

If your policy clearly states that all refunds must be requested within 30 days of purchase then you’ll expect your customers to abide by that timeframe. When a customer requests a refund on day 42 your immediate reaction may be to deny it. After all, they are well past the 30-day period stated in your refund policy. But let’s hold on before we rush to any quick decisions and consider the facts:

Did the customer ask for help trying to resolve an issue with their purchase prior to requesting a refund?

Is there a different product the customer would rather have?

Does another product you offer fit their needs?

Can you offer a discount or credit on a future purchase?

If you’re able to save the sale and keep those hard-earned dollars in your pocket, fantastic! But be willing to review all aspects of the situation and adjust your decision accordingly.

Be willing to hold your ground when necessary

Refund policies are meant to protect both parties, the business and the consumer. There will come a day when you’ll be asked to make an exception to your refund policy and you’ll politely deny the request. Whatever the reason may be, the most important thing to do is stand by the decision that was made.

The policies you’ve established exist for a reason and should be enforced, within reason. Negating a company policy can adversely affect your reputation with your customers, and your employees. Be prepared to stand by the policies you’ve enacted when necessary. Word can quickly spread between customers, and employees, and you’ll have a lot more explaining to do then.

Always, always, always make it easy for customers to request a refund

When a customer has decided the product they purchased isn’t for them, they may already have faced a number of obstacles. The product may not function as they had hoped it would or they may have already contacted you regarding quality issues. Whatever the reason for the refund request, making it easy for your customers to get their money back can help to soften the blow for both parties.

If your refund policy doesn’t clearly state how to request a refund, customers will eventually take matters into their own hands. Things typically go one of two ways when this happens, and neither scenario is ideal for a business owner.

Social media and word of mouth advertising make it easy for customers to share their opinions. When a customer is displeased with the level of service they’re receiving they may resort to a verbal attack. Resolving an issue via social media can be challenging and puts all eyes on your business.

If requesting a refund is difficult, some customers will open a chargeback or have their bank reverse the payment, which can impact you negatively. Chargebacks are a costly expense for your business.

Approximately 8 in 10 customers admit to filing a chargeback instead of working out issues directly with a seller.eConsumer Services

When a dispute is opened with a bank, PayPal, or Stripe, businesses will be asked to gather the required data to resolve said dispute. In most cases there is a fee attached to this along with the original refund amount. The dispute has now cost you more than the initial refund amount and you’ve likely wasted countless hours working to resolve it.

Make it extremely clear in various places on your site how customers can request a refund. Put it in your Refund Policy, and link to your Refund Policy from your pricing page (if you have one), or in your purchase terms and conditions. You could also provide information on how to request a refund in your FAQs, in your documentation, on your Customer Support page, or on your Contact page. Just be sure to make it easy to find and easy to do.

So, how can you reduce refunds overall?

Looking at all of the above, what steps can you, as a business owner, take to reduce the number of refund requests? Answer: Provide as much relevant information as possible up-front, and sell high quality digital products that deliver on your promises.

These are our top tips for preventing refund requests:

Be honest with your website copy. Make sure your product delivers what it promises on the metaphorical box.

Write clear, detailed product descriptions.

Provide useful supporting documentation and answers to common FAQs.

Make use of demo videos, samples, and free trials.

Make pre-sale support a priority, or offer a pre-sale chat feature on your site.

These are all tools you can arm your customers with before the sale is ever finalized. Providing your customers with the information they need to make an informed decision before they complete their purchase can greatly reduce the number of refund requests you receive.

Remember: Refunds are an unavoidable fact of life

Refunds can have positive consequences for your customers and your business. They can be a way to strengthen your relationships with existing and prospective customers, and improve the reputation of your brand.

While dealing with refunds is inevitable, dealing with them graciously is more important.Paolo Tajani

Over time, you’ll learn to not take every refund request personally, and the sting you once felt will eventually fade. Listen to your customers and learn from them. What can you change, add to, or improve upon to better service your customer?

Does your eCommerce business currently have a refund policy? Is it easy for customers to locate? Does it clearly state your policy and outline the steps a customer needs to take to request a refund? What advice would you share with other store owners when it comes to refunds?

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-reality-of-refunds-for-digital-products/feed/201219982Update for Software Licensing brings significant performance improvementhttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/update-for-software-licensing-brings-significant-performance-improvement/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/update-for-software-licensing-brings-significant-performance-improvement/#commentsWed, 04 Apr 2018 13:59:52 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1217223After an extensive beta period and four release candidates, Software Licensing version 3.6 is now available! This new version is the next iteration in a series of plugin updates we have been releasing that introduces dedicated database tables for eCommerce data. The migration of data into dedicated database tables significantly improves performance and adds greater flexibility and control for future enhancements.

As this is a major release that makes significant changes to the underlying data structure, we have chosen to roll out the update to customers slowly. At first the update will be made available to a select number of customers followed by a few more each day. This will allow us to watch out for issues that were not identified during the beta phase before all customers are updated.

New database schema

With version 3.6, we have introduced three database tables for license keys, license meta data, and license activations. After the update is installed, store owners will be shown a prompt to initiate an upgrade routine that will migrate the existing license data into the new, dedicated tables.

Once the migration is complete, all functionality related to license keys will have better performance, as will many related pieces of functionality, such as checkout and store administration.

The new database tables have the following names and columns:

wp_edd_licenses

id

license_key

status

download_id

price_id

payment_id

cart_index

date_created

expiration

parent

customer_id

user_id

wp_edd_licensemeta

meta_id

license_id

meta_key

meta_value

wp_edd_license_activations

site_id

site_name

license_id

activated

is_local

Added user role capabilities

Along with the performance improvements, Software Licensing 3.6 also includes better control over user role capabilities. We have added new capabilities to user roles so that store owners can better fine-tune the data and actions staff can access and perform.

view_licenses: Allows viewing the list table and details page of individual license keys. The capability has been added to the Shop Manager, Shop Worker, and Administrator roles.

manage_licenses: Allows modifying license data. The capability has been added to the Shop Manager, Shop Worker, and Administrator roles.

delete_licenses: Allows deleting license records. The capability has been added to the Shop Manager and Administrator.

Upgrade or downgrade price IDs on license keys

License keys with a variable price assigned to them can now have their price option edited from the Manage screen. This provides store owners and staff an easy way to upgrade or downgrade a customer’s license key from one option to another.

Download betas from the front-end

Beta version releases have been supported in Software Licensing since 3.5. In 3.6 we have improved the feature by adding support for displaying download links for available beta versions on the front-end in the customer account areas.

Notable bug fixes

Upgrading from lifetime to a bundle caused some issues with the expiration dates.

Deleting a payment record now properly affects license meta for renewals and upgrades.

Beta file URLs are no longer forced to http.

Sample plugin now uses time() instead of current_time( 'timestamp' ).

Using the empty_cart function now removes any renewal session data.

There are two additional important notes for this update.

First, license key counts will likely be different after the update is complete.

You may notice, after running the migration, that some of the status counts in the license list table have changed. This is because during the migration, some checks were run against the licenses to correct any incorrect statuses. While you may see some differences in the counts for individual statuses, the overall license count should remain the same.

Second, new purchases and license keys may be created normally during the migration.

While the data migration is running, your store will still be able to process payments and generate new licenses. This means your store will continue to operate normally and new customers will not be affecte by the data migration.

If you’re considering the launch phase of your product, you’ve already conducted sufficient research into a niche to know there is a definitive market of people looking for products like yours. Launching a digital product that you’ve spent hours of blood, sweat and tears creating is a nerve-wracking experience, but how you proceed from this point will determine how successful your product will be.

Having a plan for your launch is key

Your product might not yet be 100% complete, but you still need to formulate a plan for how you’ll take your product to the people. As the saying by Benjamin Franklin goes, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” With zero planning, you may find yourself scrambling to promote your product when it’s ready. Make time to craft a launch plan for your product, and then review the plan when you’re ready to launch. It’s likely you’ll need to to create content, engage third parties, and potentially create additional assets to share and post. All of these things take time.

It’s extremely common for people to commit to a launch date, then panic and rush to fix a website issue at the last minute because they didn’t test that everything was working as expected. Plan and prepare as far in advance as you can.

There are numerous product launch checklists out there, but this one created by Asghar Masqood is a good starting point. Not all items on this checklist will apply to your product launch, but it can help you see how much planning might be involved when your product is ready to go to market.

Important factors in your digital product launch strategy

Building an audience

You’ve already started building an audience, haven’t you? Yeahhhh, I knew you had! Awesome! If you’re already building an audience, you have a head start. You should always be working on growing your audience.

If you haven’t started yet, and your MVP is ready for launch, you need to start building an audience sooner rather than later. Like, last week. But that’s OK! You just need to get started as soon as you can.

As wonderful as it would be, people won’t magically come to your website when you launch it. They need to find out about it somehow. Let’s look at some ways you can start growing an audience ASAP.

First, define your initial target audience

Your product won’t be useful for everyone in the world. But there is agroup of people who your product will be absolutely perfect for. When the idea for your product or business was conceived, you may have already had an idea of who you were building this product for. Perhaps you were scratching your own itch, or perhaps you have an incredible talent to share with the world.

Your audience will eventually be made up of people who are interested in your industry, product niche, or you. But who are those people? Spend some time thinking in detail about who those people might be.

How old are they?

What do they do?

What is important to them?

What motivates them?

What struggles or frustrations do they have?

When defining your audience, also consider the following points:

Do you have existing customers who have purchased another product you created? Are those customers also likely to be interested in this product?

What need does your product fulfill, or what pain point does your product solve? This will help you determine where to find your most valuable customers.

If you, yourself, are your “ideal customer”, how would you learn about products like the one you have created (if your product didn’t scratch your own itch)?

The answers to these questions will help you target your launch to a more refined audience. These are also the first steps toward helping you create a Customer Persona or Buyer Persona for future marketing, which you can start diving deeper into when you have an established customer base.

Build a mailing list using an email marketing / marketing automation service

Create a form on your ‘Coming soon’ page (more on these below) to capture email addresses (leads) and store them in your chosen email marketing/marketing automation service. If you’re using WordPress there are numerous form plugins and standalone plugins that connect to various third-party mailing list services. If you’re using something else, there may be built-in functionality that allows you to connect with your chosen email marketing service.

Guest posting and pre-release reviews

Creating posts for already-established websites can help stir up new audiences and make them aware about your product. Provide a demo, sample, or beta version of your product to relevant industry blogs or industry influencers in return for an honest review. Ask them to encourage users to visit your website if they’re interested about learning more about your product.

The time to launch is… now?

When is the best time to launch your product? Great question! The answer is, there isn’t a “best time” to launch your product.

Does your product or website work? Excellent! As long as your product delivers what it says on the metaphorical box, you can start rolling out your launch as soon as you have your launch plan in place. Extra features can be added in future versions or included in your offering as your product gains momentum and your customer base grows.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put just a little thought into when you should launch! Here are the top watch-outs for new product launch timing.

Don’t launch around big holidays

Avoid big seasonal holidays and well-known sale periods. The financial stretch is real for everyone! Your potential customers will be saving their hard-earned cash for already-established products that go on sale, or they will be spending a lot of money on big events like Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Be wary when launching around minor public holidays. Like with Christmas and other such holidays, retail companies are known to discount heavily during these periods, causing spikes in spending on physical products. This could mean a dip in consumer spending on digital products. Also, many people head out of town during long weekends, so you might not be reaching as many people as you could if you launched away from a long weekend.

Monday’s adult is ready to race, Friday’s adult is outta this place!

Time of week is another factor. How do you feel on a Monday? Many people feel busy, tired, and overwhelmed. How do you feel on Friday? We’ve all been there, watching the clock, counting down to the weekend. And most people are too busy to be receptive to new products during the weekend.

Consider a launch date between Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for maximum impact. People are typically too busy on a Monday or too distracted on a Friday to fully engage with a new product or website. Catch them mid-week when they are more focused.

Look to your product for timing or seasonal guidance

Consider the content of your product and industry, and where in the world the majority of your audience is likely to be based.

Have you created an eBook targeted at health and wellness? January is an excellent time to launch and ride the wave of New Year’s resolutions.

Designed a full planner for DIY weddings? Launch in winter to help couples organize and finalize planning for their spring or summer nuptials.

Are you launching a website with courses that can help students? Launching before the school year starts is an ideal time (and may be different in each country).

Created a set of downloadable knitting templates? Get your customers prepared for winter and launch early in early fall/autumn before it starts getting too chilly outside.

Built a gorgeous new WordPress theme for websites? Encourage businesses to start the year with a fresh new look and launch in October to give people time to refine their design.

From our experience, seasonality can be a factor. For digital products, there may be a decrease in spending during warmer seasons as people spend more time outside and away from home or the office. Similarly, when the temperatures drop, people might be more inclined to escape cold weather for warmer climes, spending their money on a getaway instead of elsewhere. Take into account the above points and make the call that is the best for your product.

Getting down to buzz-ness

Your product could be a game-changer, but if you don’t promote your upcoming product, nobody will know about it. And nobody will buy it.

Don’t go from dead silence to “we’re live” without creating any kind of buzz.Kyle Maurer

Communication is 100% the most important element of taking your new product to market. There are numerous marketing channels and strategies you can implement to effectively promote your product when you are planning to launch.

Here are a couple of our favorite ways to start generating buzz around your launch.

Add a ‘Coming soon’ page

Mystery is an effective hype tactic. Humans are curious by nature. Tease people by providing them with a little information, and then ask them to sign up to join an exclusive waiting list. Put up a ‘Coming soon’ page on your website and use it to keep building that audience I mentioned earlier. Add a countdown timer to generate anticipation as your launch draws nearer. Add social sharing links on the confirmation page people are shown after they sign up, so they can share your site with friends and followers!

Free marketing activity

You’ve started building that audience, so now you can engage them with emails! Send a pre-launch email to fuel the excitement, and a launch email to notify your audience when your product is available.

Write guest articles for other blogs aligned with your industry. It might take some time to find the right blogs to approach, but when you do, and if they accept, you have an opportunity to communicate with a new, engaged audience about your product.

Creating demos or providing sneak peeks of your digital product will allow you to show potential customers what they’re buying before they purchase.

Offer your product for reviews from experts and influencers in your industry who already have captive audiences and social followings.

Craft and schedule posts on your own social media accounts to create more positive noise about your upcoming launch.

If time is limited, you can choose to focus on one primary channel (i.e. a review by an industry expert) and use other channels to support that channel (i.e. emails, social posts, and other articles).

Is the price right?

By the time you’re ready to launch, you will have already done some research into how you should price your digital product. For the actual launch period, however, there are a few more tactics you can apply to help get your product off the ground.

Offer a free period trial for launch

A free trial gives customers the opportunity to fall in love with your product before they spend their money with you. It gives them an opportunity to use or access your product to ensure it delivers on your promises.

You can also offer a free trial period and require the customer provides credit card details to take advantage of this offer. This means the customer will be charged when the free trial expires, unless they cancel their account before their trial period ends. Remember to think about the length of the trial period you intend to offer, and ensure your purchase terms or refund policy also takes the trial period into account.

Take pre-orders

With all the hype you’ll be generating, opening your doors to preorders allows customers to invest in your product before it’s even available. Whilst you shouldn’t necessarily judge your success on preorders, it can help you learn which channels of communication have been effective in driving customers to your website who are already eager to purchase!

Offer early bird or early access pricing

When you have set your pricing for your digital product, offering it at a discounted amount for a short period of time can help drive significant sales at launch. This pricing tactic can be used for pre-orders, or after your official product release.

Here are some examples:

For pre-orders: “Pre-order now and save 20% on the full product price. Prices will increase on our official launch date!”

When you launch: “Secure our special launch pricing and save 20% on when you purchase this week only!”

Test, and test, and triple check your product

Whether you are selling software, eBooks, music, photos, videos, or something else, you need to ensure your digital product MVP works as it’s supposed to. Have you tested the software? Have you read and re-read your eBook? Does the video file play correctly? Is the music file free of skips? Are your photos a high enough resolution to launch with?

If you’re selling digital products that are not software, make sure they are as free from errors as they can be. Ask other peers or industry influencers to check out your products before you launch. This is another great way to build awareness!

If you are selling software, start beta testing your MVP. Beta testing before your official launch is hugely beneficial to your business:

It’s a test run for your product. Multiple beta testers can help you pressure test your product before you launch to find how it will handle heavy site loads or scaling.

Beta testing will allow you to find any major or problematic issues you might have missed when you were building. We are often too close to our own products to see some of the more niggly issues.

It allows your beta testers to evaluate the customer experience – how is the product received by the testers?

As mentioned above for non-software digital products, it can help build awareness of your product. People who are willing to beta test products are often industry-savvy. They will be able to provide you with invaluable feedback, as well as potentially engage their connections when you’re ready to launch.

Grab some beta testers to help check for any HUGE problems, but then go for it. It’s better to launch your product imperfect and fix things later than never launch at all. It’s never going to be perfect.Ashley Gibson

Whatever your digital product is, you should also test the most important parts of your website are also working correctly. From links throughout your site, to your user registration process, to your checkout process. You absolutely need to be able to take payments on your site when you launch!

Put some stagger in your steps

A staggered launch strategy allows you to plan what information you’re going share, and when. You can roll out well-defined steps of your launch plan in small, frequent segments to keep your messages focused and to keep driving momentum. Smaller launch phases ensure the conversation about your product is fresh instead of hammering your audience with the same messages over, and over, and over again.

Here’s a super quick, very loose example of how you could go about staggering a product launch, using software as an example:

Phase 5: Post-launch
– End early access pricing, return to full pricing
– Continue to write and publish content consistently which is emailed to mailing list audience. Prepare cornerstone content to link to from other articles.
– Keep collecting feedback
– Continue working on improving product based on feedback

If you’re a small business, a staggered launch will also help you make the most of various marketing channels so you don’t burn yourself out. We don’t all have hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw at big advertising campaigns or launch events!

Keep an eye on key metrics to help you stay focused on promotion methods that work best. Some examples of key metrics are unique visitors, number of sessions (visits to your website), email sign-ups, and of course, sales.

Remember to test all of your website processes, marketing measurables, and lead capture mechanisms to ensure they are working correctly. The last thing you want to happen is to launch your product and not know where your traffic is coming from, or find there is an issue with purchasing!

When you’ve started putting your launch plan in motion, it’s time to jump. Just do it. Hit the button and launch your product!

Just launch it.Pippin Williamson

Sage words, indeed!

Welcome feedback

Congratulations on launching! But the work doesn’t stop there, my friend! Now is time to continue creating your product or products, and incorporating feedback from customers or users to improve them.

Create a minimal viable product or website, launch it, and get feedback.Neil Patel

Use email automations to ask for feedback

If your email marketing service has automation, you can use this to request feedback from new customers.

Firstly, ensure that new customers are sent to a mailing list in your chosen email service. If automation is an option, set up an email that sends after a customer has purchased your product. Set this email to send a few weeks, a month, or even a couple of months after they have purchased, and ask them to reply directly to that email with their feedback. This gives your customers a good amount of time to try out your product.

Sending an automated email without any prompting questions will encourage a more organic response from customers who are willing to provide feedback. This means they may not be thinking about any feature of your product in particular, and will be more likely to share a generalized opinion of your product.

Send surveys to your customers

Surveys are easier and faster for customers to quickly provide feedback. You can use surveys to ask customers very specific questions about your product offering, or ask them to rate their level of satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10.

Surveys allow you to prompt customers to answer questions that you are the most interested in. It also means that any verbatim or open-ended questions in a survey may be nitpicky, or focused on the specific feature you asked about. Whilst not totally organic, this prompted method of gathering feedback can help you focus on areas of improvement that are important to you.

Invite customers to give feedback through your website

Create a feedback form on your website and send an email with the link to your customers letting them know you’d love their feedback. The form might be a simple text input box to collect unprompted feedback, or a multi-step survey for prompted, focused questions. Asking customers to visit your site is a manual step, but if they truly wish to share their thoughts and opinions with you, it’s one they’ll be happy to take.

There is never a perfect time or perfect strategy to launch your product

And your product will never be 100% perfect. But armed with a plan, you can successfully launch your digital product to an existing audience. It is more important to launch now than to strive for impossible perfection. Don’t miss a moment in time fussing over details, or an opportunity to ride the momentum you have created, or a chance to capitalize on topical conversations in your industry.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.Reid Hoffman

Follow these six steps to successfully launch your digital product:

Ensure your product is at the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage

Build your audience (and keep building your audience)

Create a launch plan

Test everything is working correctly

Launch your product

Gather feedback and iterate, iterate, iterate.

Ready for liftoff? We are GO for launch! 10, 9, 8, 7…

What have you learned about launching digital products, and what advice would you give to someone launching their first product? What strategies have you used to successfully launch your digital products? Share your story in the comments!

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-to-successfully-launch-your-digital-product/feed/71216996The art of juggling many roles in a bootstrapped eCommerce businesshttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-art-of-juggling-many-roles-in-bootstrapped-ecommerce-business/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-art-of-juggling-many-roles-in-bootstrapped-ecommerce-business/#commentsTue, 27 Mar 2018 14:00:00 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1199697Every business starts with someone, be it a solo founder or large group of board members and investors. Most small businesses begin with just one or two people at the start, which inevitably means the founders constantly juggle dozens or hundreds of different tasks each day.

Learning to effectively manage the constantly changing duties of the founder’s or owner’s role can be incredibly challenging, and is one of the reasons so many small businesses do not succeed. Anyone who wants to start a business, be it eCommerce or anything else, needs to first appreciate the challenge they are taking on with the sheer number of roles they will need to fill, and hats they need to wear.

Learning to balance the responsibilities of running a business takes time and can only come through experience. You begin by knowing little more than the product or service you’re trying to build, and then slowly acquire new bits of knowledge and skill sets as the business develops. Over time, if you are to survive as a business, you become really good at taking care of the tasks that have to be done; even those that you dread doing. It’s that or fail as a company.

When Sandhills Development was first started, I was the developer/creator of the products, I was the website manager, and I was the customer support agent. I was also the marketer, the writer, and even the accountant. I did the company taxes, I managed payroll (for one person, myself), and I took care of setting up company insurance plans. It didn’t matter what the role or obligation was, I took care of it. That’s simply the nature of running a bootstrapped business as a solo founder.

It is out of necessity that founders take on all of the roles demanded of them, but it is through experience that we learn how to best prioritize our focuses and begin growing our teams and delegating the tasks that once landed solely on our own shoulders.

In 2012 or 2013, when Sandhills Development was in its infancy, I learned first hand that I should not be responsible for handling the company accounting and tax filing. This came through a nearly very expensive mistake where I miss calculated the income tax I owed through the company to the tune of $80,000. I had always managed my own taxes as a freelancer so in my mind it only made sense that I should take care of the company taxes as well. I was wrong and thankfully was able to recognize that so immediately hired a CPA (Certified Public Accountant) to assist me. I have never made the mistake of filing taxes for the company again. We always pay a professional tax firm to take care of that for us.

That was one of the first times I recognized the value in hiring someone, be it part time or full time, to help take care of specific challenges. Business owners hire new people when there are too many tasks to complete on their own, or when the needs of a role are beyond the skill set of the owner.

Easy Digital Downloads was the first product from Sandhills Development that grew beyond the scope of what I could manage on my own. It was a product I had begun building out of my own need. At the time I was the lead (and only) developer for numerous other products, including Restrict Content Pro, and I needed to have a better way to sell and market my own products. I was juggling the role of developer, marketer, and customer support with my other products and I wanted a better solution that would enable to bring all sales and communication with my customers under a single roof. Easy Digital Downloads was built to help serve this purpose and to help make my jobs easier.

As the platform grew, the demands put on me to manage customer support grew along with it. This forced me to spend more time helping customers than working on the product. To account for this, I decided to take on a new task, one that I had very little experience with: hiring. I brought on my first full time employee to help with Easy Digital Downloads support.

The first part of hiring that business owners often focus on is the cost. How much is it going to cost to hire a person for this role? The cost of a team member is one of the very obvious challenges a business owner has to take on, but it is far from the last or the most difficult when beginning to grow a team. At first, your role as “boss” is to ensure the new team member gets paid, and that they have something to work on where they can provide value. But that role quickly changes as a team grows.

At two people, the roles a founder juggles aren’t much different than before the first hire, save for the two mentioned above. As the team grows, a lot of the owner’s time is spent simply taking care of people. The team needs to be paid; the team needs insurance; the team needs ample communication; the team needs to be reassured; the team needs resources; the team needs feedback; the team needs approval; the team needs more help because they are overburdened.

These are all examples of needs that typically fall on the founder to take care of, at least initially. As companies continue to grow, founders tend to bring new people on just to help take care of needs. First there were people brought on to take care of customers’ needs, then there are people brought on to take care of the people’s needs whom are taking care of customers.

While not always the case, a good founder, CEO, boss, or whichever title is preferred, should be capable of diving into any role within the company. If there’s a role they are not personally capable of handling, they should be well equipped with the means and know-how to find a person that is capable of handling the responsibilities of the role.

The Sandhills Development team has grown from one to 18 over the course of five years. While that is in no way “rocket ship” growth that many start-up companies see, it is more than significant enough to highlight all of the various roles and challenges that are faced by those roles.

At the beginning, I was predominantly a developer and the only developer. The products grew and my focus was shifted to taking care of customers. That made it necessary to supplement the loss of my development time with new team members dedicated to development. This is a common trend seen as companies grow and is just part of learning to adopt to ever-changing roles as a founder.

Along with being the developer for Sandhills Development in the first couple years, I also managed all of the marketing efforts for our products. While I was quite good at building products and producing content for or blogs, traditional marketing channels were never one of my fortes. Once we had grown to a certain scale, it began to be painfully obvious that my rudimentary marketing skills would no longer suffice, nor did I have the bandwidth to handle marketing on my own. To ensure our products were given ample marketing efforts, I expanded the team to include multiple people whose primary job and skill set was marketing.

After less than three years from the start of Sandhills Development, I had removed development, support, and marketing tasks from my primary focuses. I still included tasks related to those jobs for several more years, and still do today, but the amount of time spent on them continued dwindled as new challenges popped up that needed attention. Recently my role changed again as new team members were brought on to take over social media and many of the company administration tasks that have typically always landed on me. This, along with hiring for other roles over the last two years, left me in an interesting position because it freed up enough of my time that I had the freedom to re-discover what my role at the helm of the company was.

Founders are generally good at taking care of things they’re required to do. It’s just part of the job. When all of the “required” tasks have been reassigned, however, a founder’s role transitions into one where they get to be more selective of the tasks they focus their time on. This is both a great luxury and a terrible burden. Business owners that succeed get there by completing the un-glamorous grunt work, and they tend to get really good at that work. When all of that work is moved off to the shoulders of others, it’s very easy to feel lost because suddenly you, as the founder, are no longer needed for the daily operations of the business.

The art of juggling the roles as a founder really comes down to being able to adapt well to rapidly changing needs and environments. One moment you’re intensely writing code for a new product, then abruptly your focus moves to server configurations because word just came that all the sites are down. In a single day, founders will often jump from acting as customer support reps, to being product creators, then on to being marketers, followed by being accountants. One month your only job is to hire new people to take care of jobs that need to be done, then the next month you spend twiddling your thumbs trying to figure out what to do because you just hired yourself out of a job.

Learning to balance all of the things that pull on your focus as a founder comes with practice. Through the last five years, there are four main lessons I’d like to share with anyone considering starting their own business and those already juggling.

First, be willing to do any job in your company. A lot of times, operating a successful bootstrapped company means getting your hands dirty and doing the work no one else wants to do.

Second, learn to recognize when someone else, either on your existing team or a new hire, is more able to perform a job than you. It’s easy to let pride get in the way and tell yourself that you’re the best person for the job even when that’s not the case. Remember, it’s cheaper to pay someone well to do a high quality job than it is to not pay someone and allow yourself to do the job poorly.

Third, adapt to change. Your role will change hourly, daily, and over months and years. To survive the constant change, you must be willing to adapt.

And lastly, 90% or more of the job of a founder or owner in an eCommerce business is to help address needs, whether those be the needs of your team or your customers. This means your job will constantly change, and that’s okay and normal.

A good founder or business owner is really good at taking care of needs. A person that can jump in and help address needs, whatever they are, is one that will do well at juggling the many roles in a bootstrapped eCommerce business, even when it’s the role of janitor.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-art-of-juggling-many-roles-in-bootstrapped-ecommerce-business/feed/71199697Selling eBookshttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-ebooks/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-ebooks/#commentsTue, 20 Mar 2018 12:54:31 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1206157Ebooks are special. It is no surprise they have always been one of the most popular types of products distributed and sold using our plugins.

A few weeks ago, we wrote an overview of the different types of digital products people are selling online these days. However, there’s a whole lot more to know about each of those different product types than we could cover in one article. So, we decided to start a new article series where we could dive deeper into each one. This is the first post in that series, and to kick it off we’re focusing on eBooks.

Here are a few reasons why eBooks stand out as a popular digital product:

They’re easy to create. Usually special software and technical skills are not required to create and distribute an eBook.

They’re easy to distribute. Getting an eBook in the hands of those who are interested can be as easy as creating a listing on a popular marketplace or just making a download link on your own website.

They’re easy to consume. Ebooks can be downloaded and viewed on most devices, quickly and painlessly.

Distributing them can fit into almost any business model. Whether it’s selling them directly, sharing them as a resource, or using them as a lead magnet, practically every site can put an eBook to good use.

Are you considering creating and selling eBooks? Here are a few things to consider:

Pricing

Marketplaces have largely contributed to the standardization of pricing for eBooks which are typically sold for a small amount. In most cases, $10 is on the high end with average prices closer to $2 or $3. The prevalence of free eBooks and the fact that consumers traditionally perceive physical books as higher in value means it is very difficult to justify a high price. Exceptions do exist for certain types of eBooks, but in most cases the customer expectation is to only spend a few dollars. This can be unfortunate for content creators whose profits are further eroded by the commissions paid out to marketplaces if they choose not to self-distribute.

Given the fact that eBooks are not complex to create and distribute, many businesses use them for purposes other than selling directly to customers. In many cases, eBooks are created to complement an existing business and distributed for free in exchange for visitor’s email addresses. This practice of collecting contacts for future promotional efforts by offering something of value for free is very popular and also very effective. While it is technically possible to offer any kind of digital good in exchange for someone’s email, eBooks are far and away the most popular for this purpose.

Ongoing revenue

Since eBooks are typically consumable (meaning not providing ongoing utility), they traditionally only earn revenue on the initial sale. As products they are not conducive to recurring models in most cases. This means if you want more money, you need more customers. Unless you create new, separate products, there is no way to get more money from past customers. This is different to some other digital product types.

Ebooks are unique in their adaptability for almost any business’ needs. At the most basic level, they can be sold up front and earn revenue immediately. But there are countless other ways that eBooks are used to contribute to an organization’s goals. Here are a few examples:

Ebooks can generate revenue through their content. I have seen authors include their affiliate links throughout the contents of their eBooks. Other times, the eBooks serve as a long-form sales pitch for another product, course, service, seminar, etc. I’ve even seen authors accept money from companies in exchange for recommending the company’s products within the eBook.

Ebooks can bring in leads. As mentioned already, eBooks are used very often as a way to get new subscribers and followers. Showing a form on a site with a message like “Give us your email now and we’ll send you a free eBook containing our ultimate guide to succeeding at everything” has proven to be highly effective at getting people to subscribe to an email list.

Books / eBooks can be great for credibility. Having “author of” or “contributor to” some book title can look really good in your bio. Many companies highlight their team’s contributions to published works on their site as a way of proving their expertise. This can make potential clients and customers more likely to trust you and buy whatever you’re selling.

Distribution

Ebooks can be easily distributed in a variety of ways. Marketplaces like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Google Play and more offer a convenient platform and a huge base of potential customers. Selling on a marketplace means you don’t have to set up your own online store and manage transactions and file delivery yourself. All you have to do is comply with the marketplace’s requirements and allow them to take a percentage of each sale.

Self distributing via your own site is an alternative to selling on a marketplace. This strategy puts on you the responsibility of creating a site and managing every aspect of it over time. We have become very familiar with independent eBook sellers here at Easy Digital Downloads because they make up so many of our users (in fact, the first time I used Easy Digital Downloads years ago, I was trying to sell an eBook). Our most recent user survey indicated that nearly 15% of people using Easy Digital Downloads are using it to sell eBooks. This means we’ve been able to learn a lot about the needs and challenges of those selling eBooks, as well as their reasons for choosing to self-distribute. Those reasons commonly include a desire for greater control over their site, a hope of more profits by eliminating the marketplace commissions, the chance to build their own brand and relationship with customers, and also the fact that many are distributing the eBook(s) to complement their existing web-based business.

Other considerations

File previews

Customers will often appreciate a preview of the book’s contents before buying. If the product is priced high and the contents are lengthy, providing some way for customers to verify that the eBook contains information they need may help increase sales and reduce refund requests. This can be accomplished by displaying images of select pages from the eBook on the product page, by offering a downloadable chapter from the book, or by referencing other content on the site which is included (since putting a series of blog posts together is a common way to produce an eBook).

File types

There are numerous file extensions which eBooks can use. Some are proprietary like AZW which is exclusively for Amazon’s Kindle. Other formats are open and can be opened in a variety of applications. EPUB and PDF are the most popular but others like ODF are also common. When distributing on an eBook marketplace, there will usually be file type requirements. If you are self-distributing your eBook it may be wise to offer a variety of formats.

Piracy

As with all digital products, the possibility of people obtaining your works and redistributing without your consent exists. This can be discouraged by using special file protection software which requires a password or some other authentication in order for the file to be opened. However, in the majority of cases this is unnecessary. Piracy is real but most of the time the effort it takes to fight and discourage it is not worthwhile, especially when the products are free or low cost. College textbooks are a good example of eBooks which often have higher prices and employ some kind of digital file protection.

Translations

If your audience is multi-national, offering versions in other languages may be smart. This can greatly expand the reach of your content. However, it can be a tedious and costly process to create and maintain translated versions. There are professional translation services available which can make this happen for you. You’ll just need to know that the more eBooks you have, the longer they are, the more languages you wish to offer, the frequency in which you’ll be updating the books (if ever), and possibly the reading level of the content, may all affect the time and cost.

Physical version

Another cool thing to consider, if the demand exists and the content lends itself to a physical format, is to offer customers a printed edition. This can broaden the reach of your information by allowing you to sell to those who prefer reading physical books and maybe even get your content on shelves at bookstores and libraries. You could distribute copies at events and offer signed copies.

Obviously, the process of distributing a physical book is far, far more involved than is the case with an eBook. The publishing process is complicated and costly. Plus you’ll have to deal with issues like shipping and inventory. Also, there are a lot of books which are better off remaining digital only, especially content which becomes irrelevant quickly. If you’re writing an eBook about using your favorite social network or web application, expect to be updating everything frequently as the platform changes. Updates to a digital book are much easier than their physical counterparts. But it is still worth noting, if the content is good and customers are willing to pay, with the same exact content you may be able to create a physical book.

Epilogue

eBooks are here to stay. The book market has clearly demonstrated that there is a place for both physical and digital books long term. What’s so cool about eBooks is that they can be distributed with virtually no overhead and can thus be employed for a variety of different purposes. Countless businesses today are either earning revenue directly through the sale of eBooks or utilizing them to further business goals in other, indirect ways.

Are selling or thinking about selling eBooks? Or are you using eBooks in other ways within your business? Chime in below in the comments to let us know about your questions or lessons learned!

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/selling-ebooks/feed/61206157Approaching the Cart Abandonment problemhttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/approaching-the-cart-abandonment-problem/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/approaching-the-cart-abandonment-problem/#commentsTue, 13 Mar 2018 14:00:34 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1200273If you’ve been running your eCommerce store long enough, you’ve probably heard this statistic: 69% of carts are abandoned by shoppers. In fact, you may be a bit tired of hearing that number, especially if you’re not sure if it even applies to your store, or what you can actually do about it.

Chances are your store has an abandonment rate around that average. At Jilt, we track abandonment rates for stores who are using our app to save these abandoned carts. Our average abandonment rate (among merchants with over $1,000 per month in revenue) is 65%, which is close to the reported average. This is a significant issue when you consider that the average order value for eCommerce shops is over $54.

In short, you’re losing out on a lot of potential revenue. Once you know have an abandoned cart problem — and trust me: you do — you can begin to take the steps necessary to mitigate it. In fact, we recommend approaching this problem from two different angles:

First, understand why abandonment happens, and work to reduce the abandonment rate in your store.

Second, understand that despite your best efforts, shoppers will still leave carts behind in your store. So while you can work to lose fewer carts, you can also work to recover the ones you have lost and convert them back into sales.

If we focus only on checkout usability issues which we – during the past 7 years of large-scale checkout testing at Baymard Institute – have documented to be solvable, the average large-sized e-commerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate though better checkout design.

With that said, if you don’t yet have at least 100 orders per month, you may not have enough data to run tests for conversion rate increases in a statistically significant way, nor are you likely to see as large of a gain in conversion rate as this without significant sales volume. However, even if you can’t accurately measure the impact of checkout optimizations with your own data, you can implement common-sense improvements based on the known top reasons for abandonment.

The top five areas you should address on your site for abandonment are:

Unexpected costs, such as shipping, fees, or taxes

Issues with checkout or site performance

Requiring a site account

Trusting the site with payment data

Not feeling comfortable with policies, such a refund policy

Reducing abandonment

You don’t have to address every single one of these points all at once, but Baymard’s top reasons for abandonment offer a fantastic roadmap for site improvements over time.

Unexpected costs or fees

As a digital goods seller, the great news for you is that the top reason for cart abandonment may not apply to your store: 60% of customers note that extra fees, such as shipping, are too high, which is why they leave a cart behind.

However, digital goods stores can still suffer because of unexpected costs. For example, do customers know immediately if tax may be assessed on their purchase in your store? 24% of customers tell Baymard that they couldn’t calculate order total costs up front, from which we can infer that people want to know exactly what they’ll pay for an order as early as possible.

For example, if I were to sell ebooks as a Pennsylvania resident, I’d need to assess tax on sales for anyone with a PA billing address. As such, I can try to show this early in the shopping journey with a widget, or try to add a note next to prices that tax may be added based on shopper locale. Think about any time your store introduces a price other than what’s listed on the product page, then show this to customers as early as possible.

Technical problems with checkout

The second most common reason for abandonment is one I tend to view in the aggregate: having problems checking out. If you look at the Baymard statistics, you’ll see phrases like “too complicated,” “website crashed,” “took too long,” and “process timed out.” All of these reasons are related to having some issues or frustration with the checkout process on-site.

Solve these very preventable issues by consistently testing your own checkout with a live order and ensuring that you’re monitoring uptime on your site. When was the last time you ran through your own checkout process for all types of items you sell? (For example, purchasing a regular product and a subscription product if you sell both.) If you haven’t done it within the past couple months, you should absolutely go through this process to see what your customers see when they shop with you.

You should also ensure you’re only showing checkout fields that are required for an order. If you only need the billing postcode for a customer to accurately assess tax (and for fraud prevention), then only show postcode instead of all address fields to cut down the steps needed to complete checkout on your site.

Guest checkout purchases

The third area to address is account creation: 37% of respondents told Baymard they left a site because the site wanted them to create an account. If accounts are not required for your products, then allowing guest checkout is a quick win to increase conversions, since it requires less trust to simply check out than to “register” for a site and allow it to “store” your information.

Of course, encouraging registration is still important. Registered customers are more likely to purchase more than once, more open to marketing communication, and more likely to complete purchases (which presents something of a paradox). To encourage registration as a way to combat future abandonment, I recommend using a post-checkout registration prompt instead, which you can enable with a single click in Jilt for Easy Digital Downloads v1.2 (even without connecting to Jilt!).

Building customer trust

19% of customers cite, “I didn’t trust the site with my credit card information” as a reason they didn’t complete purchase, so making sure customers feel as comfortable as possible is vital to completing purchases.

While trust badges (see below) on checkout are important, providing trust signals throughout your site, like testimonials, product ratings or reviews, and payment logos, helps you build trust throughout the entire shopping process, before the customer even reaches your checkout page.

On the checkout itself, you can also add trust seals or certificates from your payment provider or SSL certificate provider to reiterate that your site and checkout are secure.

Clearly publishing policies

Finally, 11% of customers note that unclear return policies caused them to abandon the sale — this is one I’ve found myself doing as well, especially for shoes or apparel. So does this apply to your store if you’re not selling something that can be returned?

While you may not have a return policy, you may have a refund policy (especially for the plugin and theme sellers out there!). While offering a refund guarantee can help with trust or purchasing objections, it’s most important to set expectations. Even if you don’t offer refunds, be sure to state this on a terms and service page clearly, and show it to customers before they complete a purchase. It’s also helpful to link to these policies in order emails or abandonment recovery emails — which is what we get to next.

Recovering abandoned carts

Now let’s try to tackle the abandonment issue by saving as many abandoned carts as possible. How much money can you recover? Here’s a quick exercise to get a good estimate:

Take your average number of orders each month — let’s say it’s 100 — and multiply it by 1.9, which will give you the approximate number of carts that were abandoned (assuming your abandonment rate is in-line with Jilt’s 65% average). This means you’d have 190 abandoned carts.

Multiply that number by your average order value. Let’s say that $50 per order. That’s $9,500 of lost revenue from abandonment, some of which we can recover.

If you can figure out a way to recover just 15% of those carts, that’s an extra $1,425 per month in revenue for our example merchant.

Let’s frame that a bit better as well: at 100 orders per month and $50 per order, this merchant makes $5,000 per month. An extra $1,425 per month means this merchant is increasing revenue almost 30%, simply by saving 15% of abandoned carts.

Is this realistic? Our average recovery rate for all merchants using Jilt is 12% of all abandoned carts. This average includes merchants who use our default email content without personalization, without adding any branding to their emails, or without addressing causes of abandonment within their emails in a detailed way. If you can be just a bit better than average by making some small tweaks to the default campaign content, reaching a 15% recovery rate is very realistic. For most merchants who do not currently send recovery emails, we see an increase in revenue of about 20% once they implement their first recovery emails.

To start using abandonment recovery emails, you’ll need to track abandoned carts on your store, and for any cart to be recoverable, you’ll need an email address for the customer. At Jilt, we track this in a few ways:

If a customer is logged in when creating a cart, we know the cart is associated with this customer, and can send recovery emails if they don’t complete purchase.

If a customer enters an email address at checkout, but doesn’t place the order, we stash that email address and associate it with this cart to send recovery emails.

You can also try to capture email addresses sooner by asking the customer for an email when adding an item to the cart. We’re about to launch this in Jilt for Easy Digital Downloads v1.3. (You can see what it looks like in action here.)

Regardless of whether you opt to use Jilt or not, you should consider these methods of tracking abandonment to ensure you have the maximum number of recoverable carts.

Next, be sure you’re aware of cart regeneration for your recovery emails. Your customer may start shopping on their desktop, and then come back later on different device to complete an order. Cart regeneration ensures the cart is accurately re-created, regardless of what device is used or how long it’s been since the cart was abandoned, which makes it as simple as possible for customers to complete an abandoned order.

Finally, to recover as many carts as possible, be mindful of the causes for abandonment we’ve outlined above. Your recovery emails should address these causes for abandonment in the email content. Our best practices for recovery emails outline this rough campaign:

Since many customers cite checkout issues as a reason for abandonment, keep this email focused on problems: ask if the customer has questions you can help with before purchasing, or if they ran into issues you can solve.

In email #2, reiterate your questions in number one, and start to overcome purchase objections. If you think customers are running into unexpected fees, you could address this with discounting (being aware of brand devaluation) or talking about your store policies. If you think customers are running into other objections, you can address this from a trust perspective: outline why purchasing from you is safe and secure.

Earlier abandonment emails are more likely to be successful than later ones, so these are where you present “last offer” scenarios: if you plan to offer a discount, do it here. Employ scarcity if you can: note how long an offer will last, or let the customer know the cart is going to expire (even though, with Jilt, we’ll store it even after your site expires the cart so it can be regenerated).

If you see conversions through your last email, it’s also worth looking to move elements of that email to previous ones, especially non-discount elements, to try to increase conversions of earlier emails.

Overall, cart abandonment represents a huge amount of potential revenue for your store that’s often lost. You can influence this metric by optimizing your site to combat common causes of abandonment and reduce your overall abandonment rate.

While these changes can be effective, customers will still leave carts behind on your site if they’re not ready to purchase. As a result, no abandonment strategy is complete without also considering how you can save abandoned sales. Adding an abandonment recovery tool to your store is a proven, effective way to recover some of these carts.

By attacking this problem from both angles, you can drastically increase revenue for your store by encouraging more potential customers to complete a purchase, making the most out of traffic your store already receives.

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/approaching-the-cart-abandonment-problem/feed/31200273Our favorite tools for running an eCommerce businesshttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/our-favorite-tools-for-running-an-ecommerce-business/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/our-favorite-tools-for-running-an-ecommerce-business/#commentsTue, 06 Mar 2018 15:00:17 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1203628Like Arya has ‘Needle’, Batman has batarangs, or Thor has his hammer, ‘Mjölnir’, everyone has their favorite tool or tools.

Have you ever come across a piece of software or a business tool that makes you so ridiculously happy you get heart eyes? Well, we know what you mean. That’s exactly how we feel about some of the tools we use on a daily basis to help keep our eCommerce business ticking along. In this post we’ll look at some of our favorite business tools, and how they can help you run your eCommerce business.

Heads up! This post contains NO affiliate links. These are simply the tools we use ourselves and why we like them.

GitHub

As the saying goes, “Teamwork makes the dream work”. Ensuring we have somewhere to capture the various things we work on is essential for our remote team. Since we’re in the software biz, GitHub is where all the magic happens. GitHub is a software development platform that allows multiple users to build and improve software together. The very first commits to the Easy Digital Downloads public repository were made mid-March in 2012.

We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without GitHub. It helps us mobilize the tasks we need to do to bring our products to life. We use it to manage and collaborate on our various software projects, as well as allow our users and the wider community to contribute by sharing their feedback, and in many cases, their code.

If GitHub disappeared tomorrow, I’d probably just quit. The concept of doing what we do without it is not just unappealing but basically inconceivable.Kyle Maurer

One of the most useful features of GitHub is the ability to organize all the feature requests, suggestions, and fixes. We prioritize and coordinate updates to our software into “milestones”. With milestones, our team is able to focus on specific tasks that will be included in the next version release or a future update. And it sure feels gooood when we close all the issues in a milestone!

G Suite

As an eCommerce business, we’re starting to make more use of the numerous apps that Google offers alongside email. The G Suite apps offer businesses of all sizes the foundation tools that every company needs; emails, documents, spreadsheets, a calendar, and a place to store various other documents and files.

Gmail is by far our most-used G Suite product, but we are increasingly relying on Docs, Sheets and Drive to share work amongst our team.

Gmail allows you to offer multiple email addresses for the same inbox. This is extremely useful for our team, who each have multiple email addresses. One address might be specific to a product we work on, such as Easy Digital Downloads, and the other address is a Sandhills Development email… but both addresses access the same inbox – magic!

In Docs and Sheets, the ability to make suggestions, comments, and changes to communal documents allows us to share ideas, thoughts and update as necessary to keep track of work in progress.

Slack

As a remote team spread across this fair Earth, from large continents to small islands, with people living in and traveling to various time zones, there is a huge element of trust. Constant communication is crucial to building that trust, so our preferred tool for real-time communication is Slack. Slack is a cloud-based team messaging tool that allows instantaneous direct messages and group messages between team members.

So many apps sacrifice simplicity for features. Slack defies this rule and does better than any other tool I can think of at providing immense power and rich features without over-complicating the experience.Kyle Maurer

Every day we hop on Slack to chat as a team. It’s easy to use, and we love its reliability. People pop up at various times when their day begins. We’ve segmented our products and projects into different Slack channels to keep the chat focus on that particular topic. Our channels provide places to discuss specific work projects, industry news, customer support, team health and wellness, company business, and engage in general banter.

Slack has numerous features that we use on a day-to-day basis, such as pinging other team members or whole channels, private text chat or voice calls with other teamies, reminders, file uploads, and much more. Many people are now conditioned to chat clients and direct messaging through social media and older chat applications, so using Slack as a place for us to chat as a team was an easy transition. If it wasn’t for Slack, we wouldn’t be able to “team” efficiently every day.

Trello

I love lists. Like, I reeeaalllly love lists. When you’re running an eCommerce business with numerous things to create, track, do, and remember, lists are vital. Well my friends, say hello to Trello. Trello is a project management application that allows you to create all sorts of wonderful organized lists. Each list has specific “cards” which you can use for various tasks, projects, questions, or just information relevant to the list topic. You can tag people, create labels for cards, add checklists, and so much more.

We use Trello for project management, but unlike GitHub, Trello is generally used for larger scale projects, long-term thinking, business planning, “moonshots”, and other things that aren’t directly related to the development of our products. We do use Trello for some product planning, but generally we use it for non-development task management. When you need somewhere to kick around ideas or manage a team of people to execute a specific project, Trello is an excellent master-of-tasks.

Zapier (like “happier” but with a ‘Z’)

One of the most common themes in the tools we use is automation, and at the top of that list, automating all the things, is Zapier. The behind-the-scenes impact that Zapier has on our business is literally a flow chart of steps that manages everything from our customers’ purchase details to their overall experience with our company.

Zapier’s ingenuity for cross-platform data management is a big reason why we’re able to offer the superior customer experience we do; everything is where we need it, when we need it there.Drew Jaynes

With Zapier, you set up “zaps,” otherwise known as ‘automated tasks’. You can define the actions of each zap so it performs as you need it to. We have zaps for emails, surveys, purchases, support requests and more. Zaps take place between our website, Slack, Trello, MailChimp, AffiliateWP, Help Scout, Baremetrics and GitHub. Even the guy at the top agrees that automated tasks through Zapier are immensely useful:

Zapier lets me easily build routine tasks that would take hours out of my day to handle manually. With a small investment of a few minutes to build an automation, I save hours every month.Pippin Williamson

Zoom

As a team that currently spends about 97% of our time apart every year, we rarely get to connect with each other face-to-face. The next best thing is Zoom. Zoom’s video conferencing allows us to host team meetings, one-on-one chats with team members, text chat during calls, and screen-sharing (which is super important for meetings about software development!).

Zoom is also extremely scalable, starting from a free account, moving to higher tiered pricing based on the number of team members and the meeting duration you need. If you’re sick of Skype, give Zoom a try for an easy-to-use, efficient, business video conferencing tool.

MailChimp

With no marketing, there is no exposure. Without exposure, there is no business. Undoubtedly our most valuable marketing tool, MailChimp caters to all of our email marketing needs. We use MailChimp for everything from automated emails, to affiliate emails, sale emails, product update emails and survey emails. With mailing list management, audience segmentation, email campaigns, automation, and reporting, MailChimp offers an all-in-one solution for managing a business’ email marketing needs.

The power of email marketing should not be underestimated – MailChimp allows us to connect with new and existing customers alike, right within in their inboxes. It doesn’t get much more personal than that!

Help Scout

The lifeblood of any customer-centric product business is the customer. We constantly strive to offer exceptional support to our customers, so any tool that helps us manage support also needs to be exceptional. In the last 12 months, we’ve helped over 13,000 people who use Easy Digital Downloads, so with the support load we see every day, we needed a tool that is easy to use, and reliable.

13,000+ people a year. 30,000+ conversations a year. Almost 100 conversations per day. These are the numbers that our exceptional help desk platform, Help Scout, provides, and it is through this platform that we are able to help our customers. Help Scout helps our team manage customer support enquiries for all of our products within a beautifully simple online interface. No more sifting through Gmail in your browser for that person who asked you a question 10 days ago!

I Help Scout. And the new “Waiting Since” feature is life changing.Keri Jacoby

We use Help Scout not only for Easy Digital Downloads, but for all of the Sandhills Development products. On top of the help desk, we also use Help Scout Docs (documentation) across all of our products to provide self-help information. You can create documentation categories to cover everything from simple FAQs or quick-fire questions, to more detailed information about your business and fine-print policies.

The simplest tools can empower people to do great things

When it comes to the tools you need to manage your business, you know best. Tools can help you and/or your team manage and accomplish their designated tasks. Research what you need in a specific tool and find the best solution for you. From our perspective, tools for team and task management, customer support, and marketing help us streamline our business and keep things moving forward.

What tools do you use to run your business? If you sell photos or graphics, music, eBooks, courses or otherwise, what applications or software help you get things done?

Do you track time to improve your focus with a Pomodoro technique app? Do you use Asana to help manage a large team? Do you use Evernote for long-form note-taking, or Things to keep track of your to-do list? Do you use MindNode for brainstorming and planning each new project or product? Join the discussion and tell us about your favorite tools!

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/our-favorite-tools-for-running-an-ecommerce-business/feed/41203628Why providing great support on your eCommerce site is important, and how to be amazing at ithttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/why-providing-great-support-is-important-how-to-be-amazing-at-it/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/why-providing-great-support-is-important-how-to-be-amazing-at-it/#commentsTue, 27 Feb 2018 15:00:07 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1200233When customers are shopping for goods and services they have a multitude of options to choose from. What makes you unique? How do you stand out from a competitor that sells similar products at aggressive prices? Support.

How you and your team execute support for potential and existing customers could be a turning point for your business. Positive or negative. From the moment a customer visits your site, you’re providing them with an experience. Arming them with the resources necessary to enjoy your products and utilize them flawlessly starts the moment they arrive at your website and is what can set you apart from your competition.

If you aren’t providing your customers with great support it won’t be long before they find someone who will.

The Why?

Word-of-Mouth

Like dropping a pebble into a pond, the experience a customer has with your business can have a similar ripple effect. Word-of-mouth is a powerful, and free, tool that can help drive traffic to your eCommerce site. Every interaction you and your employees have with a customer is invaluable and has the potential to grow your business.

When looking for recommendations regarding the best brands, products, services, and businesses, people often turn to their friends and family for advice. This type of marketing is called Earned Media, which we discuss in more detail in our post about effective marketing channels.

Word-of-mouth recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising according to a report published by Nielsen.

Ensuring your customers are satisfied with the products you sell and the support you provide them with will go along way in growing your business through positive word-of-mouth.

When word-of-mouth goes wrong

We’ve all heard stories, primarily the really bad ones, about less-than-stellar customer service experiences. Chances are, we too have had a similar experience at some point and can empathize with the story teller. We may feel outraged by how this company, no matter how big or small, treated this particular individual. This type of response can have an affect on our perception of said company and how we choose to interact, or not, with them in the future.

There’s a quote that illustrates why good customer service is crucial to the success of your eCommerce business:

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000.Jeff Bezos

In the digital age we live in it’s easier than ever to share information, both good and bad, across multiple platforms. These stories grow, and spread, and can make or break your brand’s reputation. It’s for this reason that your customers’ perception of your brand is of paramount importance.

It will cost your business 6-7 times more to attract a new customer than it costs to retain an existing customer. (White House Office of Consumer Affairs)

On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase. (White House Office of Consumer Affairs)

It takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience. (“Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner)

In 2011, 86% of consumers quit doing business with a company because of a bad customer experience. (Customer Experience Impact Report by Harris Interactive/RightNow, 2010)

When focusing on retaining customers you also want to consider the quality of your customers, not simply the quantity. More is not always better. I’m not suggesting you cut ties with customers that are challenging or don’t spend as much as others, but at some point you will encounter a customer who is rude and unreasonable, who belittles your support team, or who is unwilling to participate in a civilized conversation about their problem or concern. You can do your best to appease this customer and make things right but there will come a point where the only positive solution will be to part ways.

Acquiring new customers through various marketing channels is far more costly than retaining existing customers. Focus on retention to keep existing customers happy and ensure the longevity of your business.

The How?

Teamwork makes the dream work

When you think about providing support your first thought is likely of the support a business provides to its external customers. An often overlooked aspect of support is internal support. Support is also developers working with support staff and sales working with marketing.

Support works best when it’s done as a team. Not just a support team, but a team that encompasses many departments. To answer a customers question or solve a problem, many individuals may need to be involved. How employees and teams interact with customers, and each other, is a key factor in determining how successful your company will be at supporting your external customers.

Support starts with your employees, all employees. Creating a dynamic team of individuals that support one another is the foundation required to successfully support your external customers.

No team, only Hulk

Whether by design or out of necessity, if you’re already wrangling support (and everything else) on your own, you’re a superhero. Here are some quick tips to keep in mind when you’re flying solo with support:

Respond to your customers as soon as you can. You’re a busy one-man-or-one-woman-band, but getting back to your customers as soon as possible will go a long way toward establishing their trust in you. Thank them for their patience and then address their questions thoroughly and carefully.

Manage their expectations. If your customers reach out asking for something that you cannot deliver due to time or otherwise, communicate with them honestly in your first reply. There’s no reason to waste their time or your time. You’re already doing a heckuva big job on your own. Explain that you are grateful for their feedback or suggestions, and will take it on board for future improvements or products (but avoid promising something if you are unsure you will be able to deliver it).

Use support to build close customer relationships. As a solopreneur, you have the added advantage of being able to foster much closer working relationships with your customers. Through customer support, you can learn their businesses intimately, or understand more about their needs and wants from your product or business. Not only will your customers feel appreciated by you with the extra attention, but you can also improve your own offering based on what you learn from them. Customers who feel connected to you are more likely to advocate your business, and even return to purchase from you again. You can also lean on a closer relationship with a customer if any hairy situations arise.

As your business grows, you may find yourself stretched too thin to be able to successfully provide timely, quality customer support. Or, worse, you may even struggle to complete projects at all. If it’s a viable option for you, bringing on one person or a team of people to help with support will help your business thrive. The most significant change you’ll enjoy is a reduced support burden, and more time for you to focus on creating and improving your products.

Timing is everything

As soon as your customer submits a support request the clock starts ticking. In most cases, your customers’ will have issues that hinder their ability to effectively use the product they’ve purchased from you. The pressure is on and your ability to answer their inquiry in a timely manner can have a huge impact on how successful your interaction will be.

If you have a support team, it may be possible to respond quickly to customer inquiries. If, however, you’re on your own, you’re likely juggling a number of tasks and a speedy reply may not always be attainable. Setting expectations upfront will help set the bar when support requests are submitted. Whether your anticipated response time is 2 hours or 2 days, it’s helpful to your customers, and your support team, to set those expectations early on.

One way you can manage expectations is by replying to your customer’s initial email to let them know you’ve received their message, and will get back to them shortly. Many help desk services allow you to automate this reply, including Help Scout, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and so on. It’s one more step towards building trust with your customers, and they’ll take a deep breath and relax knowing you’ll be in touch as soon as you can.

Train. Review. Train again.

If you’re working with a support team, it’ll be difficult for them to live up to your expectations if they haven’t been clearly established and communicated. If you want to rise above your competitors, you first need to create the necessary documentation and materials for your support team to utilize. You must then ensure they receive adequate training and feedback.

We here at Sandhills Development recently created a document containing Customer Support guidelines that we felt were important to us and our customers. This was the first time a training guide for members of the support team had been created, and we scoured the internet and internal resources for a list of best practices. These guidelines help set expectations for new and veteran employees when handling support requests, and many of the practices we follow have been outlined here in this post.

Whether you’re just starting out or your teams are well established, it’s important to provide your employees with the materials and resources they need to be successful.

Help customers help themselves

Providing a customer with a great support experience doesn’t always mean there’s an interaction with a member of the support team. You can save your customers a lot of time and frustration by providing them with the tools they need to be successful without ever having to send an email or fill out a support request.

Create documentation and tutorials that help guide customers through the process of using your products and services. This can range from a simple step-by-step guide on how to renew a subscription to an in-depth video on setting up a new plugin. Providing detailed information upfront will save you hours of support time down the road.

Make sure your documentation is:

Easy to locate. No one wants to spend time scouring your website to find instructions and troubleshooting guides. Enter keywords and phrases so finding the necessary information is a breeze!

Easy to understand. Listing step-by-step instructions and adding visuals are the core components to user-friendly documentation.

Accurate and up to date. If your documentation is outdated with old information and incorrect visuals it won’t benefit anyone. Maintaining documentation can feel like a daunting task but the benefit to customers, and your support staff, are huge.

Learn from your customers

Happy customers are wonderful, but unhappy customers can provide us with a deeper insight of how we can improve a product or process and make ourselves better. If a customer has expressed that they’re genuinely unhappy with your products or the support being provided to them, it’s important to listen carefully, take note of what the actual problem is, apologize, and work towards a solution.

Don’t take things personally or get offended. Removing personal feelings from the equation is one of the hardest things to do these situations, but injecting emotions will only compound the issue at hand.

Apologize. We’ll discuss this one in more depth later, but a simple apology can have a huge impact on mending a damaged relationship.

What could/should have happened versus what did? Why? Did a product underperform? Did you fail to deliver on the services provided? Were expectations not set correctly? The first step to making things right is to identify exactly what went wrong and why.

Implement and prevent. What can be done to fix the issue and help ensure it doesn’t happen again in the future? Gather the key members needed to address the issue and create a plan.

Follow-up. Customers want explanations and resolutions, not excuses. Provide the customer with a thorough and easy-to-understand explanation of what happened, why it happened, and what you’re doing to prevent it from happening again. Thank them for taking the time to point out the issue and, if applicable, provide them with compensation.

Don’t immediately close the door on an unhappy customer. Take time to learn from the experience and reflect on ways in which you can improve and grow.

Go off script

The Easy Digital Downloads support team recently received an influx of support requests for the wrong company. Our first reaction was one of confusion. Our confusion quickly changed to shock and amusement as we got a better handle on the situation. Once we were able to collect the necessary information for the correct company, a saved reply became a vital tool when addressing these inquiries.

If you notice customers are frequently asking the same questions, your first task is to make sure your documentation is up to snuff. If your documentation checks out and you’re still seeing repeat questions, a saved reply might be a helpful starting point (I did say starting point, not a complete answer).

A quick copy and paste can easily provide your customers with the information they need while saving you time and energy. While this strategy can be time saving, it can also set off red flags with your customers if executed poorly. Below are a few points to be mindful of when using saved replies:

Use the customer’s name when replying. We use Help Scout which provides several variables that can be included in a saved reply, but depending on the system and process you use, this can be easy to overlook.

Make sure all of the customer’s questions have been addressed. Saved replies make answering questions quick and easy, but they also make it easy to overlook part of the initial message. Reread the customer’s questions or concerns and your reply before hitting the send button.

Remember, you’re a person, not a robot. Saved replies still allow for a degree of personalization. If you know the customer is in the same time zone, wish them a good morning or good evening. If they’re a long-time customer, thank them for their business. Customers will appreciate that you’ve taken notice and spent the extra time to add some personal flair.

The customer is not always right

GASP! I know you may be thinking I’m crazy, but hear me out.

One of the major disadvantages of thinking this way is the power it gives to a customer and removes from an employee. Your support staff need to be trusted to make decisions that are mutually beneficial to your company, and your customers. If your employees are afraid to correct or guide a customer who has misunderstood a product, service, or feature, it will only result in a decline in the customer’s satisfaction. And sometimes, customers are flat-out wrong.

You and your employees are the experts. Don’t be afraid to tell a customer that a product or service won’t perform the way they need it to, even if they insist it will. It’s better to be upfront than have to provide an explanation to an irate customer later. If a competitor’s product or service will better fit their needs, suggest it to them! Customers will respect your honesty and genuine desire to help – and appreciate that you’re not out to make a quick buck at their expense.

If the problem is caused by user error it’s OK to correct them, politely. Walk them through the necessary steps to resolve the issue. Avoid words and phrases like but, should, yet, just, to be honest, and I hope this helps. shudder

And as we mentioned earlier, there may come a time when you need to decide if your relationship with a specific customer is no longer beneficial. In these situations it’s safe to explain to the customer that it’s in the best interest for all parties involved if the relationship is dissolved.

Show empathy and apologize (when necessary)

When support is being handled via email, chat, or other digital mediums, it’s easy to forget that there’s more than the problem and the text in front of you; there’s a real person on the other end with real feelings. When a customer is facing a difficult issue it’s important to recognize the struggle they’re facing and the impact it’s having on their life, and possibly their livelihood. While outside stressors may also have an impact on their current state of mind, it’s important to remember your customer is a human being.

When drafting a reply to a customer be mindful of the language you’re using and the tone being conveyed. Customers facing technical issues may be feeling a mixture of emotions and are often owed an apology. An apology, no matter how simple it may seem, can have a huge impact on the customer’s mood and perception of the situation. Apologies need to be sincere, not over-the-top, and aimed at the actual issue: “I apologize our documentation for downloading files from your account is outdated; thank you for pointing this out. While we work on getting it updated, please follow the instructions outlined below.”

On the flip-side, it’s also important not to overuse apologies or use them incorrectly. Don’t ever apologize in this way: “I’m sorry you weren’t able to follow our documentation to download your purchase.” Apologize for what is within your control to fix or improve upon. Instructions can be clarified and bugs can be fixed. You do not, however, need to apologize your prices are higher than a customer is willing to pay or for how you are required to run your business. You can provide customers with the why, but you do not need to apologize for a decision you’ve made that’s within the best interest of your business.

Remember that your customers are supporting your business and helping you work towards achieving your goals. Small acts of understanding and kindness will humanize your interactions and help to strengthen your customer relationships.

Anticipate your customers’ needs

A major strain for members of your support team is ongoing conversations. While it’s best for one agent to handle an issue from start to finish, it can be incredibly taxing if there’s no end in sight. Look for unasked questions to help reduce the number of replies.

When you’re providing support, focus on anticipating the needs of a customer when replying to a question or issue. By anticipating follow-up questions you can eliminate the need for the customer to send an additional reply. If you’re suggesting a plugin, provide the customer with a link to the product and the setup documentation. If a customer has a question on their account, answer the question and provide them with login information so they can access additional information on their own.

One item to keep in mind when providing a customer with links and documentation is that when they’re asking a question, they want the answer. They don’t want to read through paragraphs worth or information to find the answer to a yes or no question. Share this in-depth information with them, but also be sure to answer their question.

People will never forget how you made them feel

Customer support can be demanding, challenging, and frustrating. But when executed with care, it can also be incredibly rewarding.

Remain steadfast in your commitment to your customers. The level of support you provide your customers before, and after the sale, go a long way in strengthening your relationships and increasing the longevity of your business. Every single interaction with your customer is relevant.

Remember not only the various ways in which you can provide customers with a great support experience, but also why it’s so important. Excellent customer support and the feeling your customers walk away with is directly linked to the success of your business. Treat each and every customer with respect and understanding, and like they’re important to the success of your business, because, well, they are!

How have you increased customer satisfaction? What are some of your best practices when supporting customers? How did you turn an upset customer into a raving fan?

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/why-providing-great-support-is-important-how-to-be-amazing-at-it/feed/61200233How much does it cost to run a digital eCommerce site?https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-a-digital-ecommerce-site/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-a-digital-ecommerce-site/#commentsTue, 20 Feb 2018 15:00:59 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1192597Last week, we looked closely at the costs associated with initially creating and launching a new digital eCommerce site. In this post, we’ll shift our sights to the many potential expenses related to keeping a digital eCommerce site running smoothly.

Here’s the good news: Compared to traditional brick and mortar businesses and even to eCommerce sites focused on physical goods, digital eCommerce businesses have very low operating costs. Mikko Sumulong of Mix Fonts describes her experience this way:

As someone who used to manage a shop with physical inventory, transitioning to a purely digital shop was much, much easier. Operating costs are definitely lower. All I had to think about was domain registration, hosting and other one-time expenses that pop up here and there.

Mikko says, “When you sell tangible physical products, you think about inventory. You worry about shelf life. You make sure that your product moves and sells. With digital products, you can sell while you sleep, inventory is virtually infinite and overhead is definitely much lower. Gone are the days of fussing around with postage and shipment, production and packaging, spoilage and breakage.”

The bad news, if you want to think of it that way, is that there are definitely some costs. It is difficult, if not impossible, to operate a digital eCommerce site without spending any ongoing cash.

For example, I recently opted for the EDD All Access Pass at $899 per year, and while this sounds expensive for a WordPress product, it’s less than $40/site per month for a robust eCommerce platform that makes selling, marketing and maintaining our plugins possible.

Hosting for a simple VPS is about $50 per month with free SSLs via LetsEncrypt. For support we’re using a free tier of HelpScout and the KnowAll theme for documentation at $150 a year.

Marketing is inexpensive as well with MailChimp at $25 per month, a free Jilt plan, and Facebook retargeting with $100 a month budget.

So for software, infrastructure and tools it adds up to around $3,200 per year.

Ross continues, “That’s only $266 per month in overhead. A couple decades ago the thought of having a sustainable business with that little overhead was practically unheard of. For comparison sake my design agency has tens of thousands of dollars in monthly overhead.”

He says, “Now where I’ve found unexpected expenses all relate to time. As mentioned I also run a WordPress design agency and am very aware of opportunity cost. The time it took to set up the sites, write documentation, design the sites (granted, we could have used an existing theme), test the payment gateways, test the software licensing and updating capabilities, etc… far exceeds the out of pocket costs for infrastructure. For some of our initial plugin releases it took more time to get the plugin ready to sell than to design and build the plugin itself.”

Primary costs

Let’s start our review of the expenses involved in maintaining an eCommerce business with the three inescapable costs: hosting, domain registration, and payment processing fees.

Website hosting

In order to exist online, all websites must be hosted somewhere. Traditionally this means purchasing a web hosting account from a web hosting company. Fortunately/unfortunately there are a lot of web hosting companies to choose from.

Choosing the right hosting company can be challenging if you are just getting started, and cost is one of the factors that will guide you as you make your decision. But there are some important points regarding cost to consider when choosing your hosting provider:

You get what you pay for. This classic rule applies so often in life, but I know many people who have uttered it at least once in relation to web hosting. We regularly encounter customers experiencing problems which can only be alleviated by upgrading to better, more expensive hosting solutions.

Expect to pay more as you grow. Budget hosting can be just fine when your business is brand new and traffic to your site is minimal. But as the number of visitors and customers increases, so will the resources your site uses. For this reason, expect the cost of your hosting to loosely correlate with your commercial success.

Domain registration

Though typically very inexpensive, domain registration is a necessary cost for any online business. Prices for standard domains are usually close to $10 per year with some newer TLDs (Top-level domains) costing a lot more, and premium domains being auctioned for thousands of dollars.

It is worth noting that many businesses end up with multiple domains in their portfolio. These domains typically fall into one of these categories:

Variations on the primary domain. Often includes common misspellings of a business’ actual domain (like easydigitaldownlods.com) or additional TLDs (like easydigitaldownloads.net).

Campaign specific domains. Many businesses employ dedicated domains in their marketing and advertising which simply redirect to the primary domain or to a relevant section on the site. These can be useful for making the address more relevant and memorable to the target audience. It is also possible, if configured appropriately, to track usage of alternate domains which helps gauge the ROI (return on investment) on campaigns.

Domains for separate brands or initiatives.

Old domains which must continue to function despite no longer being actively used.

Shortcut domains used to make navigating to the site or a page on the site simpler. For example a business with the URL acmebusinessventures.com/careers could use a domain like acmejobs.com as a shortcut to get visitors directly to their careers page more easily.

At Sandhills Development we have at least a dozen different domains which we maintain, which is not an unusually high number for a company of our size.

Payment processing

Every single payment made on an eCommerce site will be processed by a payment gateway, and all gateways charge in some way for their services. Most commonly, a small percentage of the transaction is taken by the payment processor before funds are delivered to the seller. PayPal and Stripe are the most popular gateways among users of Easy Digital Downloads and both charge 2.9% + $0.30 for every transaction with their standard plans.

There are many, many other payment gateways which are primarily differentiated by their features, supported currencies, and supported countries.

Likely additional costs

The following expenses are very commonly necessary for digital eCommerce sites, but are still technically optional:

Theme

Many platforms, especially WordPress, have a large selection of pre-made eCommerce themes available. There are tens of thousands of both free and paid WordPress themes to choose from. Paid themes are most commonly sold with an annually renewed license and tend to cost as little as $19 and as much as $199. Many theme providers sell more than one theme and memberships granting access to an entire collection are popular.

One note about themes: It is normal to change themes periodically. A website’s aesthetic can quickly appear dated, so visual refreshes are expected now and then. Plan into your budget that you will change your theme approximately every two years. Also, with that in mind, it is wise to avoid themes which are extremely complex and full of features to configure as they can create very real barriers to switching.

Plugins

In many website platforms, new functionality can be added to a site by obtaining specialized addons and installing them. These can be called extensions, apps, modules, nodes, or plugins as is the case with WordPress. Plugins are used for all kinds of different purposes. They can integrate a site with third party services, enable useful new features, improve site performance, provide additional reporting and data, modify how the underlying platform works, and more. For example, the features that make eCommerce possible on a website are often handled by plugins.

Figuring out the plugins which you will need for your eCommerce site can be challenging. Just like with themes, many thousands of plugins exist, both free and paid. Plugin pricing is also commonly based on annual renewals for updates and support.

The price for a given plugin depends mostly on how significant and complex the features are. A plugin which adds a Twitter link to your site’s sidebar will usually cost far less than a plugin which adds an entire membership management system for example. The low end of premium WordPress plugin pricing tends to be around $9 or $19, whereas the high end can sometimes be $299 or more. However, as previously mentioned, there are many free plugins available, and you might end up only having to purchase licenses for a small number of commercial plugins to fulfill your site’s technical requirements.

Email marketing

The importance of building and maintaining a list of email subscribers cannot be understated for eCommerce businesses. The only reasons that this is not listed under the primary, required costs are because one can technically operate without doing any email marketing (it would just be a huge wasted opportunity), and because some email marketing platforms have feature rich free plans.

There are a lot of email marketing providers to choose from. MailChimp is the most popular amongst our users but AWeber, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, and Drip all have large user bases – and these are just a few of the available choices.

Pricing is most often based on factors such as list size and usage (like the number of emails sent), which means it is easy to scale up as your needs increase.

Cart recovery

Cart abandonment is a very real and measurable occurrence on any eCommerce site. There will always be a percentage of visitors who begin making a purchase but for some reason, perhaps a distraction or a last second change of mind, they do not complete the process. Thankfully, tools exist now which can help bring these potential customers back. This is normally accomplished by sending an email to the prospect with a link to their cart and an invitation to complete their purchase.

Cart recovery can be a feature of the eCommerce platform, a plugin, an email marketing tool or a third party service. Features can include time delay settings, email templates, multiple emails, and dynamic discount code generation which offers an incentive to the customer if they act on the request to complete payment.

Affiliates

Affiliate marketing is a popular and proven method for driving online sales. It works by awarding commissions to third parties who refer customers. Often affiliates are paid a percentage of the final sale but some programs pay flat rates. Affiliates will be willing to promote products which are likely to sell and pay out generously when conversions occur.

Adding an affiliate program to your digital eCommerce site can be a fantastic way to bring more customers in. But affiliates don’t send customers for free. You will need to determine a commission amount which is both fair to you while also being worthwhile to the affiliate.

Other possible costs

Every eCommerce site is different and there are thousands of possible costs related to operating an online business. But here are a few which are very common:

Backups

Content Delivery Network

Uptime monitoring

Sales reporting and analysis

Advertising

Copywriting

Quick note on SSL: SSL certificates are more important than ever. Thanks to Let’s Encrypt, they are available for free in most situations. Results may vary between hosting providers but this eCommerce necessity is no longer a cost consideration.

Our costs

At Sandhills Development, we highly value transparency and helping others. In the interest of providing as much value and insight as possible for other digital eCommerce business owners, here’s a detailed breakdown of our monthly website related operating expenses:

Note that the affiliate payouts as well as the fees for PayPal and Stripe are variable numbers, and this example was taken from October 2017’s revenue. Also, these costs are for three different sites, combined (Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP and Restrict Content Pro).

Join the conversation!

Are you running a digital eCommerce site? Chime in below with your thoughts about what’s worth spending money on and what we may have missed. Or, are you thinking about starting an eCommerce site of your own? What questions do you have as you work out your plan and budget?

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-a-digital-ecommerce-site/feed/41192597How much does it cost to set up a digital eCommerce site?https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-set-up-a-digital-ecommerce-site/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-set-up-a-digital-ecommerce-site/#commentsTue, 13 Feb 2018 14:13:44 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1189833Creating a website is a lot like buying a house. Pricing varies greatly and is affected by numerous factors.

Aspects such as location, size, features, condition, and more contribute to the extremely complicated calculation which determines the final price. And even then, that price is subject to negotiations. If two houses end up costing the same, it is pure coincidence. A garage, a hot tub, granite countertops, and a finished basement will all have a measurable impact on the price of a house. Similarly, the addition of features such as renewals, shipping, taxes, sales reporting, licensing, cart recovery and more do to the price of an eCommerce site.

Another similarity is the existence of both initial and ongoing costs. When purchasing a house, it is important to consider not just the up-front purchase cost, but also the continuous expenses such as mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, homeowners association fees, utilities, and more. Websites work the same way.

Determining the cost of an eCommerce site is not simple these days. In this post I’ll provide some general guidelines which will help you set your expectations and budget appropriately before getting started with digital eCommerce.

Note that numbers shared are in U.S. dollars and are primarily applicable to businesses operating in the United States. However, the same rules apply internationally and while specific amounts may differ, most expenses affect total budget calculations similarly regardless of location or currency.

Since there are two very important types of costs to consider when figuring out how much you’ll be spending to create a digital eCommerce site, we’re going to separate them into two different posts. You can read about ongoing costs in the second part of this series, but for now let’s start with…

Up-front website costs

Most expenses related to a website will be ongoing, which we’ll cover in detail next week, however they will almost all require some initial payment. When calculating how much investment is needed to get a site up and running, both the one-time costs and the first payment of ongoing costs must be combined. Fees for domains, software, web hosting and so on will typically recur monthly or yearly, and these must be purchased up front in order to get the site created.

As for the costs which typically only apply initially, these are primarily service-based. Services relevant to the launch of an eCommerce site can include:

Logo design

Copywriting

Website design

Theme development

Plugin development

Content migration

Site configuration

Consulting

Development of integrations with other services or data sources

Development of the actual product(s)

Research

Photography

These are just a few examples of services rendered by professionals which can be paid for and apply most frequently during the early stages of a project.

Of course, the majority of new eCommerce site owners won’t be hiring unique professionals for each of these services. Some services will not be urgently needed, some service providers can take care of multiple tasks, and some to-dos can be handled by the site’s owner or team.

Building a website yourself

If you’re the DIY type and believe your project could be better off if you handled a lot of the setup work yourself, that’s awesome! You’ll be able to save some money, learn new skills, and become intimately familiar with how your eCommerce site works. All good things. However, I do strongly recommend carefully considering two important principles:

1. Opportunity costs

Imagine you’re a software developer. You make software products for a living and want to start selling them. So you set out to create an eCommerce website. You spend two weeks figuring out and setting up your hosting account, domain, SSL certificate, and email. You spend another two weeks learning WordPress, choosing a theme, tweaking your theme, adding some plugins, and configuring everything the way you like it. Then you spend another two weeks creating a logo, tweaking your branding, writing the content for your site, creating demo videos for your software, writing documentation, setting up a support system for customers, and dealing with the legal necessities for starting a new business.

At the end of these very busy six weeks, you’re ready to start selling! You’re proud of yourself because, other than the costs of filing paperwork with the government and purchasing web hosting, you’ve spent no money at all. If you imagine that x is the amount of dollars you would have spent hiring professionals to do all that, then you have saved x dollars by doing it all yourself.

The only problem is there’s one thing you didn’t do during those six weeks: build software. During all that time creating your website, you didn’t do what you’re best at, which is writing code. No new apps or programs were created, no features were added, no bugs were fixed. What would all that work have been worth if you’d spent the six weeks on it instead? If you imagine y is the value of six productive weeks writing software, then y is money lost by doing something else. This is your opportunity cost.

Putting these numbers together can reveal whether hiring professionals or doing everything yourself is the wiser investment. Take x, the amount you could save by doing it yourself, and then subtract y, the amount you’d gain by working on your product instead, to see what the difference is. This almost always requires some rough estimation and there are definitely other factors, but it is still a valuable exercise for all entrepreneurs.

2. Doing it right the first time

My father always used to tell me that the easiest way to do something was to do it right the first time. He worked in construction and home repair and knew from experience just how costly it can be to take shortcuts. Entire projects can fall apart and need to be rebuilt because they were built on flimsy foundations or without vision or precision. Websites are no different.

When considering whether to hire or tackle a project yourself, it’s important to recognize that without years of learning and practice, you may be unable to produce something quite as polished as an experienced professional. How important is quality to your project? Can you afford to risk going live with something subpar? And what happens if you end up needing to completely redo everything later on because it was not developed properly? This happens all the time. I’ve witnessed firsthand how often this happens, with numerous clients having come my way due to disastrous attempts at self-built sites or cheap projects gone wrong.

Paying someone else to build a website for you

Service related costs vary tremendously. You can hire someone to design your new logo for $5 or $5,000. That said, it’s possible to get an idea of what your costs may be. In the interest of keeping this post concise, let’s focus on website development.

The first factor to consider when estimating cost and choosing a provider is the provider’s status. Web professionals can typically be grouped into three tiers.

Hobbyists

Freelancers

Agencies

Hobbyists

Hobbyists are individuals who build websites as a side project and not as their full time profession. These can be people in the early stages of learning, or just doing it as a way to earn a little extra cash, or both. They may have aspirations of transitioning to doing the work full time, or they may look forward to not having to hustle on the side to make ends meet. The key identifier is that the service you are hiring them to perform is secondary to them.

Hiring hobbyists can easily be a huge win or an epic fail. This tier of professionals is the least predictable. You may end up engaging with a budding expert who is just beginning to flex their development muscles, but who has not yet started charging expensive rates. Or you may end up working with someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, is learning everything on the fly, and doesn’t take your project very seriously.

The benefits of working with hobbyists are:

You can potentially hire them for steeply discounted rates

It is possible sometimes to form fruitful, long-term relationships as their skills and commitment increases

The cons are the risk that projects will…

Fail

Be abandoned

Be implemented poorly

Take much longer than estimated

It’s important to remember that someone inexperienced in developing websites is likely also inexperienced with accurately estimating timeframes and cost; both of which can come back to hurt you.

Freelancers

The middle tier of web professionals consists of individuals who are building websites full-time but are not a part of a larger organization. This is their focus and how they pay their bills but they do it, at least mostly, alone.

Working with freelancers is much less risky than working with hobbyists simply because they are more committed and often more experienced. However, they will typically charge higher rates, though still less than agencies as they have far less overhead.

The pros of working with freelancers are:

The ability to work directly with the web professional, which may not be the case with an agency

Usually lower rates than agencies

Often greater flexibility is possible when it comes to project specifications and timelines, compared to with agencies which may be more restrictive

Typically more skilled, experienced and reliable than hobbyists

However, there are a few downsides:

Since they operate solo, they may not be able to provide the same level of guarantee that an agency with fallback resources can

Their expertise may be narrower which means it may be necessary to employ other parties for other parts of the project

Agencies

The most reliable, predictable, and reputable provider for website development is also often the most expensive and rigid. Agencies are larger businesses with teams of people. They will have specialized staff assigned to different aspects of the project, such as design, development, and project management. They may have a well defined process which you will be required to follow.

Bringing on an agency to create your eCommerce site will more often than not be the least risky of these options in terms of production quality, accuracy, finishing on time and within budget. Agencies will usually have a proven track record and a reputation to uphold. They will be less likely to encounter surprises along the way which impact you negatively.

Contracting with an agency is a great choice because:

Risk of failure and project abandonment is low

They are better equipped to handle unexpected events (like a change in circumstances for those working on your project, or a last minute change in tack from your business)

They are the most likely to still be around when you come back with other needs a year or two later

But there are a few reasons to consider otherwise:

They’ll cost the most

They may impose their own process vs. adapting to your preferences

You may be interacting only with an account or project manager rather than the actual production team

It is important to note that these observations are generalizations and not strict rules. There are hobbyists who charge more than some freelancers, and some freelancers who charge more than some agencies. They key when making a choice between providers is to compare apples to apples. Your needs may be best suited to working with an agency. If that is the case it would be prudent to look at a variety of agencies and compare them against each other. It is not constructive to evaluate them against a reputable freelancer you’ve heard of or your niece who just learned how to build websites in a college class.

Also worth noting for each of these types of professionals, but especially for agencies, is the local market really matters. Equivalent professionals may charge very different prices simply because of their location. For example, an agency based in New York City will very likely charge higher rates than one based in Boise, Idaho.

Project complexity

One of the most important factors contributing to the final cost of creating your digital eCommerce website is the feature set. In the good old days of web design, prices were often very simply calculated based on the number of pages needed. For better or worse, it just doesn’t work that way anymore. Today, much greater emphasis is placed on the features a website needs.

Here is a short list of eCommerce features which a website developer or agency would need to know about before they could provide a cost estimate:

Product reviews

Multiple payment gateways

An affiliate tracking system

Discount codes

Specialized reports

Product variations

Transaction fees

Taxes

Pricing tables

Refund processing

Customizable purchase receipts and new sale notifications

These are only a few of hundreds, if not thousands, of potential features which will affect the final cost of a website built by a professional. What each developer charges for each feature will vary, but the general rule is that more features will always result in a more expensive project.

Timeline

Deadlines are a big deal when planning a project. For starters, when hiring a professional, availability can be an issue. Most web developers are not able to start new projects at the drop of a hat and some may even be booked well into the future. But more pertinent to this post’s topic is the schedule’s impact on pricing.

Scheduling does not always directly affect project pricing. Often though, web developers are willing to consider accelerated timelines for a premium price, and occasionally may be willing to negotiate a discounted rate for a more relaxed deadline. After almost six years of building websites for other businesses, I learned the average time to completion was three months. Periodically we would consider requests from clients to speed up the process which always necessitated compromises such as higher pricing or a reduced feature set. Web developers often quote the old adage: “Good, Fast or Cheap. You can pick no more than two.”

Website creation cost estimates

The fact that pricing is far from standardized and every project is totally unique makes providing accurate numbers difficult, if not impossible. However, through experience with pricing projects, studying pricing strategies, and learning from peers in the industry, I’m able to offer some insight and rough guidelines.

Here’s a breakdown of what you should expect to get based on various budgeted amounts:

< $1,000

For a budget of less than $1,000 you can expect to be able to put together a very basic website, possibly with the help of a hobbyist. A freelancer may be available who can take on a portion of the project but not likely an entire site. Don’t expect anything beyond some consulting from established agencies.

$1,000 – $5,000

This range is where experienced hobbyists and beginner freelancers will be be pricing projects most often. At this level you can hire either a semi-experienced freelancer from a small market or an inexperienced freelancer from a large market to complete a project for less than five thousand dollars. Some agencies may be willing to provide limited services in this range but rarely complete projects.

$5,000 – $10,000

Crossing the $5k threshold is where more experienced, reputable freelancers will become interested. Expect to be taken seriously by experienced freelancers and some small agencies if your feature set is not huge.

$10,000 – $25,000

With a budget in the low five figures, you will be able to work with middle to top tier freelancers and small to mid sized agencies for complete projects.

$25,000+

If you have a budget above $25,000, you should expect to be working with established, reputable agencies. Top tier agencies may consider this a starting budget for very small projects, but many boutique, capable agencies will be able to complete feature rich websites at this level.

Once again, these estimates are based on experience and will help you set reasonable expectations. It is also worth noting that eCommerce sites can absolutely get far, far more expensive than $25k but at that point, these guidelines break down and are less helpful. Six- and even seven-figure projects do exist, however they are typically bespoke, enterprise level projects, delivered over extended time periods by the upper echelon of industry professionals.

The bottom line

Upon reflection and conversations with contacts in the industry, a common sentiment is that much of the initial cost of setting up a new digital eCommerce site, is paid in time rather than money. Between the research it takes to determine which tools are appropriate, hiring and working with a professional, learning how to use the site, branding, developing content, and everything else that goes into launching a new venture, it is important to recognize that some effort will always be necessary. The dollars and cents may vary but the commitment needed to make any new business truly successful remains constant.

What have your experiences been regarding the costs (both time and money) to build digital eCommerce sites? Did we forget anything that you believe is important for new store owners to remember when first setting up their website? Leave a comment below!

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-set-up-a-digital-ecommerce-site/feed/21189833Effective marketing channels for your online businesshttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/effective-marketing-channels-online-business/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/effective-marketing-channels-online-business/#commentsTue, 06 Feb 2018 15:00:17 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1192839Whether you’re just getting started, or you’ve been around the block and back again, marketing will always be a part of your business.

Marketing is broad. It’s not just an ad in The Economist, or a billboard in Times Square. You don’t need a multi-million dollar budget for a 60-second spot in the Super Bowl ad break, nor do you need to try and win awards at Cannes. When you speak to someone about your company, that’s marketing. When you send an email with your company signature, that’s marketing. When you give a local meetup talk or participate in a podcast about your expertise, that’s marketing.

And it is crucial to the success of your business.

But marketing can be downright scary if you’re already wearing a million hats in your bootstrapped company. Or it can be incredibly confusing if you’ve typed “How to market my business” into Google 10+ times, and closed your browser window straight away. We’ve pulled together some of the most effective marketing channels for your online business, along with some extra tips on how to use them.

But first, why should you market your business?

If people don’t know about your product or your business, how can you even be considered an option? You can’t be considered. And without marketing, you won’t be considered.

If you offer a digital product or service that will solve a problem for many people, you need to tell them about it. You need to generate awareness of your business and your brand. You need to educate people about what exactly you offer, why it is valuable (or more valuable than other similar or competing options), and how it will improve their life when they work with you. That is why marketing is crucial.

Who should you market your business to?

Do you sell a digital product that other businesses will use (B2B – Business to business)? Or do you sell a digital product that is meant for an end user (B2C – Business to consumer)? Is your product targeted at mothers, fathers, kids, or grandparents? Does your consulting service suit the software industry, or are you a life coach? Knowing your audience is imperative to deciding which marketing channels you should investigate further.

Any existing data you have on your current customers will help you define who your customers are. Don’t have any data? Get in touch with your existing audience to learn more about them:

Conduct a short survey with several questions that will help you uncover who your audience is, and send it to them via email.

Engage with them. Talk to a handful of your customers one-on-one. Get to know them. Have a discussion and learn about their goals and their struggles.

You may also wish to find out which marketing channels your existing customers use, which could help you decide if you should use those channels to reach new potential customers.

Once you have a better understanding of who is already using your product, you’ll be able to paint a picture of who your ideal customer is. Some channels allow you to target specific audiences so you can more effectively use marketing to attract your ideal customers.

Wait… what are channels?

Marketing “channels” are also called “mediums” by advertising and media agencies. Essentially, it is the means or method used for distributing a message to a specific audience.

Almost all channels and media can be categorized into three groups: Paid, Owned, and Earned.

Paid channels/media are services and placements that have been literally paid for. You are in control of the content that goes in the paid spaces, but you don’t own the space.

Owned channels are directly influenced by you. You are in control of what goes where, and how your business is represented in that space. You own the space (or the account, in some cases).

Earned media is free, but it is not controlled by you. It is given at the sole discretion of others. And it’s the most valuable exposure you can get.

Let’s look at some of the most effective marketing channels for online businesses under each of these categories.

Paid

SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is paid advertising through search engines. Ads that promote your business will appear when certain keywords or phrases are searched for by search engine users. You’ve probably seen them before, they look like this:

SEM is excellent for increasing awareness. It can also indirectly affect your site’s rankings. Paid ads on search engines encourage clicks, and clicks may lead to increased exposure. This could include links from other sites, sharing, and so on; these things do boost your organic search ranking. Both Google and Bing have tools to help you create ads.

Search Engine Marketing tips:

Do some research on keywords and phrases related to your business and your industry.

Create a list of keywords and phrases, and start searching. What kind of results do you get? Are there other advertisers targeting the same keywords? Are your competitors popping up when you search for these phrases? What phrases do they match up against? Are these phrases that you want to use to increase traffic to your own website?

If you’re willing to give SEM a shot, you can start out small to see how it goes. There is no minimum spend, and you can pause spending at any time to stop spending out (you’ll have to pay what you’ve spent, of course).

Bear in mind that running one ad for one day for $1 probably isn’t going to tell you much about how successful your SEM activity was. If it’s feasible, try running several ads for a few months to see how they perform.

Fun fact: SEM ads are not affected by ad blocker software which hides display ads for users on both mobile and desktop.

Retargeting / remarketing

Retargeting is a paid channel that helps you convert “window-shoppers” into purchasing customers. It tracks and targets people who have already visited your website after they have left your website. Retargeting shows these people a display advertisement for your product or business. These people are likely already interested in your product, as they have already visited your website.

A display ad is usually an image, which may have graphic elements and text. There are various sizes and formats as websites sell various ad placements on their homepage and content pages. Here’s an example of a display ad/display banner:

Retargeting services tap into large advertising networks with huge numbers of websites that sell advertising space on their sites. These websites are then broken down into categories for easier targeting. The Google Display Network has one of the largest display networks in the world.

We started using retargeting last year, and after just a few months, we saw some very surprising results:

Many retargeting services have a pay-as-you-go option, so you can choose how little or how much you spend. This allows you to dip in and out of retargeting if you want to take it for a test drive before committing to it as part of your long-term strategy.

Retargeting/remarketing tips:

Offering a discount code or coupon in a retargeted ad is more likely to convert a “window-shopper” into a paying customer: “Come back and save 10%!”

Not-so-fun fact: Display ads are affected by ad blocker browser software, which hides display ads for users on both mobile and desktop. Ad blocker penetration is growing, but it is not the norm. Keep in mind that ad blocker software is a factor if you are looking at investing in retargeting.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a paid channel that brings other people into your business to help you promote it. With some firm terms and conditions in place, it is incredibly low risk, and highly effective. Here are the basic steps:

You recruit people to become affiliates

Affiliates promote your product via an affiliate link/URL to your website (the affiliate is tracked through this link). They share the link with people they know or through their own marketing channels

If a potential customer clicks the affiliate’s link, and successfully completes a purchase on your website, the affiliate is paid a commission.

Affiliates aren’t awarded a commission until a sale is complete, meaning you don’t pay them anything until a referred customer purchases your product.

As an example, in September 2017 we paid out around $1,300 in affiliate commissions to our affiliates. Those affiliates helped us generate ~$5,000 in net revenue (after the affiliate commission) on top of our regular sales. That’s revenue we may not have earned had it not been for our affiliates helping to promote our products.

Affiliate marketing tips:

Spend some time researching to determine what type of affiliate marketing solution will work best for you. You can run a self-hosted affiliate program on your own website, or you can use a 3rd-party solution.

Don’t set your commission rate too high that you lose out. You have bills to pay, too!

If you have a refund policy for your store, only pay affiliate commissions after the refund policy has passed. This means you can reject an affiliate’s commission if a customer they referred requests a refund. You can put this in your affiliate terms and conditions.

If you are running a self-hosted affiliate system, review your affiliate applications carefully. Make sure your affiliates are the right fit with your business.

Owned

Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the most popular owned marketing channels. By placing a sign-up form on your site, and connecting it to an email marketing service, you can collect the email addresses of potential customers. Creating a mailing list of people who are interested in the products you sell or the services you provide gives you an audience to engage with on an ongoing basis.

Email marketing is effective for numerous reasons:

Email is one of the most widely used communication methods

Almost all email users check their email every single day

You control the content that is included in the email, so tailored messages can be communicated to specific groups of people, at specific times of day, in specific locations

It is more personal than other channels

It is cost effective, and can be completely free to use

The people on your mailing list are validated – they have provided you with their email address so you can communicate directly with them.

Email marketing tips:

Use an email marketing service like MailChimp, Aweber, ActiveCampaign (to name a few). The features they provide will make your email marketing more streamlined and easier to manage. Plus, they provide reporting and data so you can see how your emails are performing.

Use emails to inform your audience or customers of news, updates, sales, and content. Stay in touch with them on a regular basis to keep your business top of mind and grow your awareness.

Social media platforms

Social media is another owned channel that allows you to form connections with people. It opens up the opportunity to have discussions with your followers or customers in real-time or near real-time, and some people prefer interacting with businesses on social media for a more personal experience. You can quickly communicate to people who follow you en masse, or directly to individuals by sending them a message. And it’s free to set up an account and start posting!

Most social media platforms channels also have excellent audience data, which you can use to learn more about the interests and behaviors of the people who follow your business. Some social media channels also have paid advertising opportunities to further extend your reach to extremely targeted audiences.

Social media tips:

Don’t bombard your followers with a constant stream of posts. For many people, social media is a means of staying in touch with people they know – use it to create a connection with your followers.

Be mindful of what you post on social media – everything you say is a reflection of you and your business.

Secure the social media handles for your name or your business name as soon as you can. Grab them on the popular platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (if it’s right for you). Or, create a handle as close to your business name as possible. You never know when you might want to start using that account!

Your website

The one channel you have the most control over is your website. And having the right information on your website will determine if a visitor stays or goes. How many times have you opened a company’s website just to close it down almost instantly, because it either 1) wasn’t relevant to what you were looking for, or 2) wasn’t attractive enough for you to want to stay?

Your website is your home on the internet. The primary face of your business. It’s also where you turn visitors into customers.

Your website should provide important information about what you do or sell.

It should detail the value you offer and the problems your products solve.

Be sure to use phrases that your ideal customers would use in search engines to help improve your organic ranking.

Ensure that your customer service and support process is helpful and useful to customers. Customer support or service on its own is another marketing “channel”, though in most cases it will live on your website. This essential touchpoint for your customers can make or break a relationship (or a sale). It directly links to the success of your business, and can be extremely rewarding when implemented and managed with care. It also has an impact on Earned media, specifically WOM, which we’ll discuss more in the next section.

The biggest tip I can give you with regard to your website is to create content. Content marketing is one of the most effective ways you can communicate with people through your site. Publishing valuable, useful, relevant articles will open another forum for discussion on the topics you write about. When potential customers are researching online for keywords or phrases specific to your business, the content you create will appear in search results. When you post content regularly, you’ll build trust with your customers.

Earned

Rallying a community around your brand, business, company, or product is the ultimate win. People who completely believe and trust in what you create should be your ultimate goal.

These people don’t just like you, they love you. Lovers of your brand or business believe that what you do makes their life better. They’ll then communicate their positive feelings about your brand to anybody who will listen. It’s like having a dedicated PR team always at your back.

Now, there aren’t any tips for this section, because from a traditional marketing perspective, earned media isn’t influenced by your company. But in fact, earned media is wholly influenced by your company. Every single touchpoint of your product or business impacts on a user or a customer, from the email sign-up, to the purchase process, to the customer support they receive. These people have to be utterly in love with what you do for them before they become an advocate for you.

Why is earned media so valuable? Online research. Most people conduct research before they make a purchase. And whilst your website is your primary channel, potential customers won’t stop there. They will continue researching about you and your business until they are satisfied that your store and your business is the one they want to purchase from.

Word-of-mouth (WOM)

Organic, un-bought marketing, straight from the horse’s mouth, online or offline. Word-of-mouth is the most trusted form of marketing, from one user or customer to another. With word-of-mouth, your brand or product is the first thing that comes to someone’s mind, usually because of the positive (or negative) experience they had with it. Or, someone they know and trust had a positive experience with your business. This can, of course, swing either way; positive WOM is as influential on a new potential customer’s purchase decision as negative WOM.

Articles and reviews about your business on other sites

Unprompted, positive articles written by other people and posted on their own websites reflect favorably on your business. Positive reviews impact how people feel about your business when they are still in the consideration stage. Whether these articles and reviews live on social media, or on unbiased third-party sites, they’re an incredibly powerful earned asset which can influence a customer’s decision to choose your business over a competitor.

Testimonials

When a customer is over the moon with your product, service, company, or all of the above, they will be more than happy to provide you with a testimonial. Glowing testimonials should have pride of place on your website – put them on your homepage. It’s not arrogance if it’s true!

A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is — it is what consumers tell each other it is.Scott Cook

Earned “media” is priceless. It is real-world testimony that the experience that you and/or your company delivers to people is meaningful and worthwhile. Earned media cannot be bought. Paid articles, reviews or testimonials are sponsored activity, and are not earned. This is the pot of gold right here, folks!

Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint

It’s about the long game. And you don’t have to try and do everything! Are you flying solo or part of a modest team with all hands on deck? A pay-as-you-go option that you can set and forget for a little while will help you get started with marketing. The more consistent you can be, the more people will learn about your business, the more you’ll learn about what channels work best for you, and the more top of mind awareness you’ll earn.

Try a free marketing channel, spend a little bit of money on some paid activity, or start writing content. You don’t have to commit to any one channel forever, and you can change how much or how little you can realistically achieve at any point in time. If you’ve started a digital product business, and you want it to go the distance, make marketing your next step.

Tell us which marketing channels you’ve had success with! Have you tried any of the channels we’ve listed here? Are there any others you’d like to try but haven’t yet?

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/effective-marketing-channels-online-business/feed/121192839How to successfully run a sale on your eCommerce websitehttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-to-run-a-sale-on-your-website/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-to-run-a-sale-on-your-website/#commentsTue, 30 Jan 2018 15:00:32 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1189626Discounting your products or offering a promotion for a short period of time can help you boost sales, increase profit, and grow your website’s exposure.

But don’t be blinded by dollar signs and zeroes on the bottom line – organizing a sale is a big task. Join us as we look at how to successfully run a sale on your website.

Ahh, the humble sale

A sale (not to be confused with a completed purchase) is a tried and tested marketing tactic. The primary goal of running a sale is to boost profits in a short period of time. A sale can be very short (just a few hours, or for one day only, known as a flash sale), or a longer sales event (several days, a week, or a month). This marketing tactic is often communicated to potential customers as a sale, a flash sale, a sales event, a promotional period, a promotional event, a discount period, a price slash, and various other creative ways.

Historically, flash sales and sales events have been implemented for one of the following reasons:

To quickly sell off inventory

To encourage more customers to purchase during a specific period

To increase store traffic or target specific audiences

To move a company out of debt

Or to simply get businesses out of a sales plateau.

One of the most popular sales events that continues to grow globally, both online and offline, is Black Friday / Cyber Monday. Tens of thousands of brick-and-mortar retailers and digital sellers participate in this seasonal sale worldwide, and customers are literally spoilt for choice. As consumers decide where to spend their hard-earned cash, the fight for the dollar is often dictated by how low you can go.

Some businesses choose to run multiple sales per year with measurable success. Some choose to not run any sales at all. Deciding if a sale is a viable marketing tactic for your digital store is completely personal to you and your business. Used strategically, periodic sales can help you grow your business, and incentivize customers to choose you over your competitors.

The benefits and the be-wary-ofs

Running a sale on your website can definitely be sunshine and roses, but there are some watch-outs to be aware of.

Benefit: A boost in the bottom line

Undeniably, the most beneficial element of running a sale for a business is a quick boost in revenue, and potentially profit. When your business makes more money, you can re-invest funds into people, tools, and time to make your product offering even better for your customers. Running a sale is a quick way to inject revenue and/or profit growth into your business.

Here are some quick numbers from our own sale experience with EDD last year:

5-day ”End of Winter Sale” in March 201722% increase in revenue for March compared with the previous month (February 2017)

5-day ”Summer Sale” in July 201716% increase in revenue for July compared with the previous month (June 2017)

4-day sale in November 2017 for Black Friday/Cyber Monday89% increase in revenue for November compared with the previous month (October 2017)

Benefit: Hassle-free digital products

Running a promotion on a website that sells digital products is significantly less complicated than a site that sells physical products. If you’re a digital product creator, below are some of the advantages you’ll enjoy when running a time-sensitive sale:

No shipping stress. That goes for both delivery and returns. No lost products, and no waiting for days or weeks.

No inventory issues. Digital products don’t run out of stock.

No delivery delays. Customers experience instant gratification as soon as they have completed their purchase. Files are delivered instantaneously or they can download their purchased products straight away.

Benefit: Customer loyalty and satisfaction

A sale isn’t just about padding your wallet. It benefits both you and your customers.

You can reward loyalty by offering discounts or promotional specials to existing customers. It’s just one of many ways you can say “You rock, thanks for sticking with us!” For new customers, an introductory deal will help get them on board. In both cases, you’re building on those relationships and fostering advocacy and admiration for your business.

Be wary of: The spiky end of the sale

Manage your own expectations of how your sale will perform. If you’re offering a discount and you do see a spike in sales figures, it will likely be temporary. Don’t be disheartened if sales return to a lower level (even lower than your regular base) after a sale period – this is completely normal. At the end of the sale and after some analysis, you can decide if you will or will not consider running another sale in the future.

Be wary of: Running. Sales. All. The. Time.

Sales fatigue and discount mentality are very real. When a company runs numerous sales per year, or if products are frequently (seemingly always) discounted, customers grow exhausted of the constant battering of “Sale! On now!” messages. Whether bombarded via email, online ads, or even traditional media, there is a point where people will tune out, block messages, and no longer do business with a company due to sales fatigue.

Some businesses are so deeply entrenched in the discount mentality, their product costs may never get back up to their original price. Profit margins are lowered, and the company becomes stuck in sale limbo.

For this reason, sales, discounts and promotions are not for everyone, but like most things in life, you won’t know unless you try.

There is no magic number for how many sales you should run each year. There is no correct discount percentage you should offer. Every website is different. Every business is different. Start with one sale (away from any major holiday periods), and go from there. Try adding another promotional period. Compare results as you go.

Why do you want to run a sale?

When you’re thinking about running a sale, you need a clear goal in mind. What do you want to achieve if you run a successful sale on your website?

Do you want to bring new customers on board?

Do you want to encourage repeat purchase from your existing customers?

Do you want to blast out of a long-term slump and boost sales figures?

Do you want to switch customers from one product to another?

Do you want to increase sales for a particular product?

Do you want to grow sales in a generally quiet period of the year?

Do you want to get more exposure on industry websites?

Do you want to increase your bottom line?

Write down a specific goal and work towards it as you set up your sale. This goal can impact the way you set up your sale, who you are targeting, the copy or language you use in your marketing materials, or the channels you use to promote your sale.

Discounting your products

Setting a discount

Deciding what your offer will be is one of the trickiest parts of setting up a sale. Should you offer 15% off? 30% off? 50% off?

Take into account the following points when setting a discount:

The discount needs to be worthwhile for the customer – small discounts won’t move the dial.

You need to be happy with how much you walk away with on each completed purchase, after the discount has been applied. If your product is priced low, and your discount is high, you won’t make enough money on each purchase for the sale period to be worthwhile for your business.

How much is the cost of goods? (How much time/money goes into creating that product?) This can be tricky with digital products, but you are well within your rights as a digital product creator to charge a higher price for something you spent many hours creating.

Are there any other costs that need to be paid on the completion of a purchase? (Are you paying vendor commissions? Affiliate commissions?)

Do you need to pay tax when someone purchases from your store? (VAT for customers in the EU? Goods and services?)

What other after-sale costs do you have? With this discount amount, will you make enough money to “keep the lights on” and pay your bills (both personal and business)? Do you have team members to pay?

Here’s a quick example to help you get started with calculating your final purchase total:

After the above purchase is complete, you walk away with $64, down from $100, for that one purchase. By spending some time on this exercise, you can work out what you can actually afford to discount your products at. Adjust your discount accordingly so it benefits both you and your customers.

Preparation is crucial

There are two key points you should take away from this article, and this is the first one.

I’ll say it again… preparation is crucial. In fact, Benjamin Franklin said it best; “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”. Use an application or service to help you manage the various elements of your sale and the tasks to be completed. We use Trello to keep track of our sale tasks, and the checklist feature is extremely helpful. Team members are tagged when they are allocated specific tasks, and each task is checked off the list as it’s done.

Running a sale can be fun and exciting, but it’s not necessarily easy. The more prepared you are, the more beneficial the sale will be to you, your team, and your business. It certainly won’t be fun if you’re scrambling to pull everything together at the last minute, or if something breaks and you don’t have instant access to a developer. It might be exciting, buuuut not in a good way.

We’ve broken down the lifetime of a sale into three basic parts: before, during, and after. Let’s jump in!

1. Before the sale

Who are you targeting?

Think about who you are targeting. Is it brand new customers, existing customers, or followers who haven’t purchased yet? Knowing who you’re talking to will help refine your promotional material and language.

Now you have the “who”, determine “what” and “when”

Since your sale will be taking place on your website, you now need to consider which products will be included, and when your sale will run.

Are you including all products in your sale, or just one?

Choose the date or dates you will run your sale, and how long it will run for.

You may choose to run a sale away from busy holiday sales to make the most of what is usually a quiet month, or during a seasonal sale period to try and capitalize on the sheer amount of traffic created by sale awareness.

Decide on the times of day you will run your sale.

Will those times be based on your time zone, or a different time zone? Consider where the majority of your customers are based when deciding which time zone your sale will run in.

Decide on some sale tactics

Planning some specific sale tactics will keep you focused as you pull together the various elements of your sale.

What discount mechanic will you use during your sale?

Will you provide a coupon or discount code that customers can enter at checkout, or automatically apply a site-wide discount?

Display a countdown timer to drive urgency and FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)

Update your pricing page or pricing table to show the discount, the sale price, and to highlight the savings

Play on exclusivity:

“You won’t find this value anywhere else”

“This is the best price compared to competing products”

“Only available to the first 50 customers

“Only available to existing customers”

“Only available when you sign up to our newsletter”

Optimize your checkout to show deals based on spend levels, before the purchase is completed:

Check your terms of service

Are there specific terms and conditions you wish to include or introduce for your sale period? Are there rules, limitations or exclusions? Add the specific dates and times of your sale and clearly state the discount amount in your terms of service.

“To qualify for the discount, you must…” Include a specific action if customers need to qualify for a discount.

“Licenses are not transferable.”

“The discount code cannot be used in conjunction with any other promotional codes.”

“No refunds, sale is final.”

Make sure these are clearly displayed somewhere on your website. You can place these in your regular terms and conditions, in promotional material fine print, or before the customer gets to checkout. If you’re not sure what is and what is not legally enforceable, reach out to a legal consultant for further advice.

If it’s an option, automate your sale

Automation is incredibly useful when it comes to running a sale. It’s especially invaluable if you have hundreds of products for sale on your website.

Schedule creative changes and theme customization based on a time frame

Flag and notify the relevant people when a high-risk purchase is attempted

When we run sales at Easy Digital Downloads, almost everything is automated:

We schedule all emails through MailChimp

Emails are then sent out automatically based on the dates and times we have set

We create a discount code that is scheduled with a start date and time and expiry date and time, and various site elements automatically updated based on that coupon code’s settings:

The discount amount appears in the site notice

The site notice goes live at the top of the website when the sale starts, and disappears when the discount code expires

The pricing page is updated to show discounted pricing during the sale, and returns to show regular pricing when the discount code expires.

What you don’t know can hurt you

If you work with a team of people, brief everyone on the details of the sale. Share the terms and conditions with them, and ensure you have some team members on deck when the sale launches.

Team members dealing with customer support should be made aware of the sale details, and a senior member of the team should be available to help if there are any tricky customer questions.

At EDD/Sandhills Development, we use Help Scout for customer support. For previous sales, we’ve set up bare-bones saved replies with phrases specific to that sale. We’ve then used these saved replies to help us quickly respond to customers during a busy sale period. Each customer receives a unique reply from one of our team, but some carefully crafted language in these saved replies helps us answer certain sale questions as quickly as possible.

Avoid the crashed cart

Users will get impatient if your website is slow, whether on desktop or mobile. Users will abandon your site if your pages aren’t loading or the checkout process hangs.

Optimized images for faster page loading will make a visitor’s time on your site streamlined and more enjoyable. Ensure your website is responsive and mobile-ready for a beautiful experience on any device. Make sure your checkout process is as simple as possible by removing any unnecessary form fields.

It’s almost impossible to predict if you’ll get 1 or 1 million visits to your website during a sale, but if your website goes down, your sale will suffer. Make sure that your hosting provider and the plan you are on can scale as needed. If you’re not sure if your server or hosting plan can handle a spike in traffic, get in touch with your hosting provider or check out their documentation.

Get ready to promote the heck out of your sale

Marketing and promotion is a requirement when you are running a sale (and that’s non-negotiable!).

Without promotion, something terrible happens…. NOTHING!P. T. Barnum

There are numerous ways to promote your sale, but here are just a few of the methods we’ve implemented with excellent results:

Email marketing

Affiliate marketing

Social media posts and paid activity

Cart abandonment software or services

Retargeting to people who have visited or performed an action on your site.

Use language in your marketing materials that creates a sense of urgency to drum up excitement for your sale:

“For a limited time only…”

“Don’t miss out on…”

“Last chance to…”

“Hurry, only 10 hours…”

When marketing your sale, think about what your customers get when they purchase your product or service. What is unique to your business? How does your product improve their lives? What problem do you solve for them? What value do you offer? Is it something different, or would you just be spouting something your customers have already heard? Use the answers to these questions to help you determine what messages you should include in your marketing.

Test, test and test again, and then test some more (and a few more times)

I mentioned there were two key points in this article, and this is the second one. Test the purchase process yourself so you know exactly how it works, and so you are certain it works as it is supposed to.

Set up your discounts or coupons, set up any automation you need (if anything), and test, test, test.

Depending on your eCommerce system, you may be able to test the checkout process using certain payment gateways (e.g. cheque, or bank transfer). If you have to create a new live product for $1 to test with, do it. You can always refund yourself. Test the steps a customer will go through. Ask someone else to test the process. Test it again. The very last thing you need is for your checkout to break when you’re running a limited-time sale, and you have a lot of traffic coming to your site.

Get testing! (Did I get my point across yet?)

2. During the sale

Wahoo! You’re up and away! Now what?

Actively monitor your sales

Stay on top of customer support emails and respond to your customers in a timely manner

If you have staff, make sure your team is on deck, they are briefed on the sale, and are aware of any relevant terms and conditions

Open up communication through Facebook and Twitter, and any other social channels you use. Engage with customers during the sale via social media, answering questions and resolving any issues as quickly as you can

And of course, keep promoting the heck out of your sale.

If something does go wrong

Breathe. Start diagnosing the issue as quickly as you can. If you have a team and need help, ask them to help sooner rather than later. If you’re flying solo, step away from other tasks and focus on resolving the issue.

If something is seriously broken, you can always pause the sale and decide to resume it at a later point. If it comes to that, try and remove any site notices or creatives, and pause any live advertising as quickly as possible. Apologize sincerely to any upset customers, and make good on any mistakes or issues later if necessary.

3. After the sale

Phew, you’re all done! After you’ve taken a deep breath, work through this short checklist to finish up.

Post-sale checklist:

Ensure all sale materials, creatives, sale elements on the site have been removed or unpublished

Stop any advertising that is still live

Reflect on how your sale performed:

Analyze your sales results

Compare results for your sale period with several non-sale periods as a control (be wary of using holiday periods as a control)

Did you see an increase in sales? Or did sales figures stay the same?

Were certain products more popular than others?

Did you get any feedback from customers?

Was the support load lighter or heavier?

Were there many questions about the sale, or just general questions about your products?

If you didn’t get any feedback, ask your customers if they have any feedback for you

Take stock of what you learned:

Was it smooth sailing?

What could have been better?

How can you improve if you run another sale?

Sale away!

Running a sale is always a learning experience, but with some preparation and a specific goal in mind, you can successfully run a sale on your website. The tips in this article can be applied to any sale, regardless of its length or scale. Remember to test the purchase process, look after your customers, and promote the heck out of your sale to bring more people to your site. But be quick, time is running out!

Have you had success with running a sale on your website? What tactics did you use? And more importantly, what did you learn?

If you sell memberships on your website, a free trial membership is an excellent example of something you can give away. This allows potential customers to experience how your membership system works, and to download a sample number of your products to see if you have what they’re looking for.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you exactly how you can use three Easy Digital Download extensions in tandem to offer free trial memberships to your audience.

Create a “free trial membership” on-boarding process for your website

There are three main parts to this process:

First, you need a membership system in place

Then, you need to capture the user’s email address

And lastly, you want to create a seamless, easy registration process.

The membership system

All Access is the first extension you’ll need, as it will handle the free trial membership that allows customers to unlock products and download them. It will also enable you to sell paid membership upgrade options, which we’ll cover later in this article.

For example, you can use All Access to create a free 2-week trial membership with a download limit of 5 products in total. When potential customers register for this free plan, they get a taste for how your website works and your products.

Additionally, All Access allows you to create paid memberships which have higher download limits, like 10 files a month, 100 files a month, or even unlimited files. You can also restrict access to certain categories which are unlocked through the paid membership, and not available through the free trial.

Your free trial members will be incentivized to upgrade to become paying customers, and to do so extremely easily.

The email marketing system

Marketing to your free trial members by sending newsletters is the next piece of the puzzle. There are numerous email marketing platforms available, and arguably the most popular service is MailChimp.

The EDD MailChimp extension works alongside the All Access extension by automatically adding a customer’s email to a mailing list when they register. This makes it easy for you to send valuable emails to your free members, giving them incentives to upgrade to your paid membership plan. If you use something other than MailChimp, don’t worry! You can check out all of our email marketing extensions to see if we integrate with the service you use.

Optimizing the registration process

To make the on-boarding process simpler for the free trial membership, you can use the Free Downloads extension. Free Downloads streamlines the process of buying a free product so the user doesn’t have to go through a checkout screen to register on your website.

You may also want to use the free Auto Register extension so your customers don’t need to manually create an account when they sign up (Note: Having an account is required for a membership, because the user must be signed in to get access to downloads).

Together these four extensions can help you attract new customers, market to them, and provide them with free sample products at a rate you are comfortable with. Again, the extensions are:

Then, select the zip files for each plugin and upload them. Once uploaded, it will ask you to “Activate” them. Do that as well.

Step 2: Create the free membership using All Access.

To create the free membership, we will use the functionality provided by the All Access extension. In your WordPress dashboard go to: Dashboard → Downloads → Add New

For the title of the product, call it something like “Free Membership”.

Now, scroll down to the metabox called “All Access” and check the option “Convert this product to an All Access Pass”.

Choose which product categories you’d like to include. Most likely, you’ll want to create a category of products called “Free Membership Products” for this purpose. (Note: You can put products that aren’t actually free into this category, and your free members will still be able to download them for free.)

Next, we’ll set the duration of the free membership. If you would like this free membership to last forever, set it to “Never Expires”. Otherwise, you can set it for any time period, down to a single day. In this example, we’re setting the free access to 2 weeks.

Now, we’ll set the download limit. This gives users a taste of how your membership system works, and prevents them from downloading everything in the category immediately. We’ve set the download limit to 2 downloads per day.

3. Setting the price

Because we want this product to be free, we will leave the price as 0. This allows customers to access this product without having to pay anything. Based on our above settings, once the user has completed the “purchase”, they will immediately be granted access to 2 downloads per day from the “Free Membership Products” category, for two weeks, with a maximum of 5 downloads per month, and a limit of 10 downloads in total.

Now that all settings are complete for the Free Membership, click “Publish” at the top right.

4. Create the paid membership using All Access

Next, we want to ensure our customers can upgrade to a paid membership and get access to more products.

We will create the paid membership product using the exact same process from steps 2 and 3 above. However this time, instead of leaving the price set to 0, we’ll set it to $100.

We’ll also adjust the All Access settings so users who upgrade get access to “All Products”, and set the duration to 1 month.

Of course, you can set the price, membership duration, download limits, and which products users can access to anything you’d like. You could even create different membership levels by simply repeating steps 2 and 3 again, and tweaking the settings for each new product.

5. Configure the MailChimp extension

Now we’re ready to configure the MailChimp extension so customers with a free membership are automatically added to a MailChimp mailing list. We’ll then be able to send them more information about the paid membership level, prompting them to upgrade.

Scroll down until you see the “Mail Chimp” metabox and select the list to which you’d like to subscribe your free members. In my setup, I have created a list in MailChimp called “Free Members”.

Now, all of your free members will be easy to reach with newsletters, promotions, and links guiding them to upgrade.

6. Configure the Free Downloads extension

Lastly, to make the on-boarding process simpler for your Free Membership, we will configure the Free Downloads extension. This will allow customers to register without even needing to see a checkout screen.

Look for the two settings titled “Button Label” and “Modal Button Label”, and set both to show “Get Free Membership” (or whatever you would like the button to say).

Scroll down and find the setting called “Display Opt-In” and enable it. This will make it super simple for customers to opt-in to your newsletter when they register for your free membership.

Here’s what that will look like to your customers.

And just like that, with a single click, our customers have a free trial membership they can use to download 2 free products per day, for 2 weeks. We have their email address and permission to send them emails, and we have a paid membership they can upgrade to easily.

Pro tip #1: If you want memberships to renew automatically for your paying customers, you can use the EDD Recurring extension to automatically charge their credit cards on a monthly basis (or whatever period you choose for your All Access membership length).

Pro tip #2: If you want to prevent your products from being purchased/downloaded unless the customer has an Access Pass, go to the settings for All Access, find the option called “Change the way purchase buttons are displayed” and choose Option #2.

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/how-to-give-away-trial-memberships/feed/61069205Proven ways to get more visitors and more converting customers to your sitehttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/proven-ways-more-visitors-more-converting-customers/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/proven-ways-more-visitors-more-converting-customers/#respondTue, 23 Jan 2018 15:00:17 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1184400You’ve developed your products and created your site, you’re ready to go live, but now what? How do you actually get visitors to your site? And once there, how do you convert them into customers?

I’m glad you asked! Your site is the face of your store and your hardest working asset. To find your target audience and increase your conversion rate you must first stand out amongst a sea of billions of other websites. It can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be! We’ve put together a number of tips and tricks to help you get more visitors, and more converting customers, to your site.

If you build it, they… will… come?

While that may be true in the movies, it’s far from reality when it comes to your newly launched eCommerce site. You can’t make sales if you don’t have any customers, and in order to have customers they must first visit your site. Paid search and display advertising will help increase brand awareness and encourage people to click the link and visit your site. But what are some other options? Check out the list below for just a few of the ways you can increase the number of visitors to your site.

Marketing

1. Social media

Think Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Snapchat and YouTube. These are great avenues to help you gain exposure through brand recognition while making you more accessible to potential customers.

HubSpot published a blog post stating 92% of all marketers indicated that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses.

2. Content marketing and blogging

Content marketing and blogging will help you make a connection with potential customers by providing them with relevant information while increasing brand awareness and getting them to your site. Include lists, quotes, and images in your content; they’re eye-catching, and simple and easy to follow.

3. SEO/keywords

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become a cornerstone component of marketing strategies because it is cost effective, and it works! Search Engine Optimization is the practice of creating content on your website using relevant keywords and phrases, so when users search for those keywords and phrases in a search engine, they find your website and content. Landing on the first page of Google search results doesn’t happen by accident, that’s SEO at work. Focusing on relevant keywords can help you target individuals who are already looking for you.

When used correctly, keywords will improve your search engine ranking, which in turn improves visibility and increases visits to your site.

Engage with your users

Responding to reviews and posting answers to questions are simple, impactful ways you can interact with your customers. Your presence will help increase awareness and show potential customers that you take a genuine interest in their questions and concerns. Engaging with existing customers in this way also allows you to take advantage of some of those keywords we mentioned earlier.

Get out there

You are the face of your business, and there’s no better way to convey your passion and enthusiasm than face-to-face. There are likely a number of events or meetups in your area that focus on the products you sell, the software you use, or other topics that get you excited. Being a social butterfly will give you the opportunity to toot your own horn while making new connections.

Attending, volunteering, speaking at, and even sponsoring events will help you meet new people while increasing your business' brand awareness.Click To Tweet

Turning your visitors into converted customers

As the number of visitors to your site increases, so will your sales, right? Not exactly. Now that you’ve learned how to increase traffic to your site, keep reading to discover ways to turn those new visitors into buyers. You’ll need to engage visitors and grab their attention to convert them into happy customers.

Think fast

And I don’t mean being quick on your toes. What I’m talking about is speed. As traffic increases and potential customers are making their way to your site, how your site performs can be a game changer. Increased load times will ultimately result in visitors leaving your site to do business elsewhere. That’s lost revenue for you now, and likely in the future as well.

53 percent of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load

Images, video, animation, design effects, and other forms of code bloat will play a considerable role in the load times of your site. In a 2015 study of top stores by Radware images were found to make up 60% of store content. The scary thing is, most sites don’t use image optimization at all.

Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, which means faster pages earn a higher SEO ranking. A slow site kills conversions. Optimize your images, videos, and other content to help reduce load time and improve your website’s performance.

Live chat

If you want to increase sales while keeping costs down you’ll want to consider live chat. Answering pre-sale questions, upselling, and providing site assistance are all ways that live chat will help you convert visitors into customers. Aside from the time savings for your customers, live chat also helps reduce support tickets. Your customers are less likely to buy the wrong item and request a refund if you can help them BEFORE the sale takes place. Use live chat and convert visitors into customers without them ever leaving your site.

Email marketing

Among the many benefits of email marketing, low cost is an important aspect for small businesses. The initial investment and setup costs are often minimal and the ROI is measurable.

To get started with email marketing, you’ll first need to collect email addresses. Offering a newsletter your visitors can subscribe to, or collecting email addresses in exchange for a free product, will help you grow your list. When used effectively, promotional emails and newsletters allow you to stay in touch with your existing customers. And because emails can be shared and forwarded on to friends, it’s a great way to drive new visitors to your site! Reach out to your customers via email marketing when you launch a new product or run a special promotion.

Testimonials

While it may seem uncomfortable to ask, adding testimonials from happy customers to your website will help potential customers see the value in your products from another person’s perspective. In many cases, if a customer is happy with your business, they will gladly provide a glowing testimonial for you. Asking for a testimonial will strengthen your relationship with existing customers, and can result in repeat business. This is also another opportunity for you to utilize the powerful benefits of SEO and keywords! Increase sales by harnessing the power of your raving fans.

Demos and free trials

It’s unlikely that you would buy a new home without taking a tour first. Demos, or virtual tours, generate interest and excitement in your products by showcasing the features and benefits of your products. Chances are you also wouldn’t buy a new vehicle without taking it for a test drive. Depending on the type of products you’re offering, free trials can be another way of letting your customers take your products for a spin and try before they buy.

Product demos are a way to sell the value of your product. In other words, you build them and then allow the product test to speak for itself.Brenda Barron, Digital Inkwell

Giving your customers the option to see, and experience, your products prior to purchase will help ensure they purchase a product that best meets their needs, which in turn means less refunds and support requests for you.

Running a sale and FOMO

If you’ve ever seen a banner like the one below and taken advantage of a limited time offer, you’ve experienced FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out.

Many companies, including Amazon and Expedia, employ these tactics when advertising limited quantities, sale prices, and even shipping deadlines. You can create urgency and motivate visitors to become customers through the use of banners, pop-up notifications, and well-placed notices on your products. Limited time or quantity offers increase urgency, which leads to a fear of missing out on a great deal or product.

Time to get those visitors purchasing!

The tips provided in this post are just a few of the resources you can utilize to increase visitors to your website and convert visitors into customers. Take the options above for a test drive to find the best solutions for your site and target audience. While it may not be practical to apply all of the options available, try a mix that fits within your niche, and your budget. And while you’ll be eager to see improvements, it’s important to remember that measurable gains will take time.

Are you ready to attract more visitors and make more conversions? Here are some next steps to get you started:

Look at historical data like monthly visitors to your site, and monthly conversions/sales to give yourself a baseline

Set some visitor goals and conversion goals to work towards

Be mindful of the audience you’re trying to reach and test the options that will best fit your business. Look back at your previous customers, run a survey, or deep-dive into market research to figure out who your most valuable customer is

Make use of tracking and analysis tools like Google Analytics for visitors, and your eCommerce software or service for conversions

Use social media insights and even direct customer feedback to check if you’re on the right path

Keep track of your performance over time and make changes as necessary.

Have you successfully increased your site visitors, and seen an upward trend in conversions? What tactics or tools have you used that worked best for your business? Let us know in the comments!

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/proven-ways-more-visitors-more-converting-customers/feed/01184400The 12 most popular digital products you can sell onlinehttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-12-most-popular-digital-products-you-can-sell-online/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-12-most-popular-digital-products-you-can-sell-online/#commentsTue, 16 Jan 2018 15:00:20 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1164884As the team behind an eCommerce plugin, we constantly see the different types of products people are selling online. Most commonly, online stores sell digital products or physical products.

Selling physical products, whether handmade by the designer, or created by someone else and onsold, is highly changeable, and extremely time-consuming. There are the added complexities of shipping, international customers, taxes, laws, importing, inventory management, and so on.

Digital products, however, are in a league of their own.

In comparison, digital products are easy to distribute, significantly more sustainable, can be replicated infinitely, and are oftentimes simpler to create. With little more than one or a few devices, any person is capable of making a digital product worthy of sharing or selling. No physical materials, factories, or staff required. Just a computer, a sprinkle of passion and drive, and some time.

So, you may now be wondering “But what types of digital products can I create?” Well, we counter your question with a question in return: “What kind of products do you want to create?”

If you have something to share, you can turn it into a digital product to sell. You can share your knowledge, talents, opinions, or passion, and potentially make some money along the way.

In this post we’ve gathered a short list of digital products you can sell online. Get ready for some digital product inspiration, so you too can start creating and sharing with the world!

1. eBooks

eBooks have been and continue to be one of the most popular digital products for both creators and customers. They are relatively simple to produce since they require little more than written text and a few relevant images. eBooks are simple to distribute via large marketplaces or self-created online stores. They’re easily consumed by customers, who can read them on e-readers, tablets, computers, and even their mobile phones.

The beauty of creating eBooks is that you can share almost anything you know, or are passionate about, in text form. You can educate, advise, or curate existing content with an eBook to then sell on your website.

2. Software

Selling software online is something we should know a fair amount about. Not only have we helped thousands of customers sell software online, but it was originally the entire purpose that we created Easy Digital Downloads for; to sell WordPress plugins online. All types of software sales combined make up nearly 28% of sites using our platform, so it is something we truly care about.

The software industry is enormous and consistently growing. It is also extremely ripe with opportunities. Any person’s ability to write code of any kind can result in new, useful products. Whether it be desktop software, web-based applications, website templates, mobile apps, video games, or anything else powered by code. The possibilities are endless, and an established market likely exists.

If you speak (or rather, write) a code language, you can develop numerous things to sell online. Whether you have experience with apps, plugins, themes, snippets, websites, or something else entirely different, you can turn code into cash.

3. Video

Video is an extremely popular and effective format for delivering information online. Video content can be educational, informative, or entertaining. It’s significantly more engaging than text, and can be easily consumed by clicking a play button and watching. Users love video, and in many cases are happy to pay for it.

If you’re a great public speaker, have a visual-based passion, or just love sharing your thoughts on video, with a little editing time up your sleeve you can sell videos online.

4. Audio & music

Audio is a powerful medium for communicating messages, and there are many different types of audio digital products. People pay for audio tracks that entertain them, soothe them, inform them, inspire them and help them achieve business goals, to list just a few examples. Audio products can include:

Recorded lectures

Musical samples

Audiobooks

Foreign language lessons

Relaxing background noises

Karaoke versions of popular songs

Reusable sound effects

Full lyrical or instrumental music tracks

5. Photography

High-quality, premium photos are one of the most sought-after digital products today. The biggest consumers of online photographs are bloggers and website owners.

It’s true that stock photography has commoditized the market to the point where some photos are sold for less than they are worth (or they are given away for free). However, for truly spectacular images (and not some of the cheesy stuff you’ll find on stock websites), photographers can still command fair prices.

One of the biggest downfalls of stock sites from a customer perspective is not knowing exactly how much one or two images are. In some cases, a membership to the stock photo site is required. If you’re a photographer, you can combat stock photo sites by selling your images on your own website for the price you want (and undoubtedly deserve).

A website is a vital part of a photographer’s portfolio. Showcasing your work beautifully is imperative to raising your profile. With competitive pricing, and excellent quality images, it’s possible to do very well selling your independent or client-commissioned photos on your own website.

6. Graphics & digital art

Graphic designers and digital artists can create a wide variety of unique and valuable products. From logos, to .PSD templates, to icon packs, to PowerPoint themes, to original artworks, designers can apply their skills in numerous ways to create digital products for sale.

7. Documents

Documents come most often in the form of informational pieces (like industry reports, manuals, or guides) or templates (like resumés or proposals). There are documents which are password protected, documents which include large files, documents with variations on the same files (like other languages or color schemes), documents which can be well suited for recurring models (like periodically revised or updated reports), and documents shared freely as lead magnets.

Have you written blog posts on your website specific to your industry or profession? If so, consider the value of packaging up your content and selling it as a manuscript or white paper so others can learn from you. You’ve already shared your knowledge on your website – curating it into a useful document for sale will be beneficial for both you and your site visitors.

8. Courses

e-Learning is an industry rich in innovation, and is growing with unprecedented momentum. As it grows, we are starting to see traditional educational institutions explore new ways to make their content available to learners. As for established educational programmes, learning material can be sold in a few different ways:

As a downloadable one-off course

As a downloadable collection of courses

As a memberships/subscription to a web-based service.

Courses are very often sold the same way as other digital products, and with the same tools, which is why we’ve become very familiar with online course sellers.

According to our recent user surveys, the number of people using Easy Digital Downloads to sell courses has quadrupled in one year. This is the most drastic increase for a specific product type we’ve seen since we started monitoring this data through our surveys.

Some courses are entirely autonomous, while others offer interaction with a teacher or assignment reviewer. Many courses provide students with some form of certification or reward upon successful completion.

Courses are becoming an increasingly popular foundation or complementary component for online businesses, due to consumer trends, and the prevalence of affordable and easy-to-use Learning Management Systems. They offer a lucrative outlet for anyone with knowledge or expertise, and enable educators to reach a broad audience without being constrained by geography, technology or time.

9. Professional services

Services are, of course, not products at all. However, they are very commonly sold in the same way digital products are. They are often sold one of two ways:

As fixed-price services. The cost of the service is predefined and known to the customer before needing to engage with the service provider.

On a case-by-case basis. The required work is scoped by the service provider, quoted to the customer, and the cost is agreed upon by both parties.

In the world of eCommerce, the line between product and service has become a little fuzzy, and in many cases, the customer doesn’t care very much about the difference. Customers can buy pre-made logos as a product with a defined price. They can also pay a predefined price on some sites to have someone design a logo which results in a very similar experience and end result.

With many service-based jobs, you are selling your time in exchange for a specific outcome or result, instead of a product. Or, you may be selling your time for a completely bespoke product, unique only to that one customer.

These days, all kinds of service providers are opting to sell their services online. Below is a very brief list of some of the professions that can sell services online:

Graphic designers

Web designers

Copywriters

Translators

Consultants

Trainers

Coaches

Legal professionals

And that’s barely scratching the surface! This is another segment of digital products we have seen on the rise, with more than three times as many people selling services using Easy Digital Downloads now compared with a year ago.

For an excellent, detailed read about selling services online, head over to another post we wrote on the topic.

10. Tickets

Though definitely quite different from other digital products due to the fact that they are (usually) applicable only for a certain time period, relate (often) to some physical location, and (normally) have limited availability, tickets are very commonly sold in the same way everything else in this post is. Customers can make their selections, checkout and receive their ticket independently and instantly through a seller’s website. These tickets can get them into conferences, concerts, carnivals and other time-based events or can be for admission to amusement parks, zoos and museums which may not enforce a specific time. Tickets can also be sold for purely online experiences such as webinars, classes, online conferences, or in-person conference live stream feeds.

11. Fonts

Typefaces are a great example of a digital product which is always popular and constantly experiencing change as customer preferences gradually shift over time. Fonts can be created and distributed for use on the web by website creators, or for use in desktop applications like Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. Enthusiasts appreciate fresh new fonts which means continuing to expand one’s commercial catalog over time may be necessary in order to maintain revenue.

12. Web-based applications

Web-based applications are similar to software, but are not downloaded from the web. Instead this category encompasses anything customers pay to use within a web browser. Also called SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses, they are not digital products in the truest sense, but can be sold and perceived very similarly, so they are important to acknowledge.

So, what will you start selling?

We are constantly observing changes in the popularity of certain types of digital products for sale, as well as technological advances to make selling digital products easier. Courses, services and web apps are all on the rise. WordPress plugins, video and graphics are still very strong. Clip art and Flash-based games appear to have seen their day. We’re extremely interested to see how things will change over the next few years!

Did we miss any products in our list? We’ve looked at what people were selling in 2017, and in previous years. Is there something you believe we’ll see more of in 2018 and beyond? Are you already selling digital products on your site? Or are you interested in getting started? Join the conversation in the comments below!

And remember to sign up to our mailing list to keep an eye out for future blog posts that will dig deeper into the digital products mentioned above. Let us know if there is something you’d like to see us cover in more detail!

Illustration by Jessica Johnston.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-12-most-popular-digital-products-you-can-sell-online/feed/181164884MailChimp extension updated for improved eCommerce trackinghttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/mailchimp-extension-updated-for-improved-ecommere-tracking/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/mailchimp-extension-updated-for-improved-ecommere-tracking/#commentsTue, 16 Jan 2018 02:02:58 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1182682The newest version of our MailChimp extension has been released after an extensive beta period. This new version introduces support for many of MailChimp’s latest eCommerce tracking features, giving store owners more valuable insights about the effect email marketing has on their store’s revenue performance. Along with the enhanced eCommerce reporting available, this update also introduces support for many of MailChimp’s automated eCommerce emails, such as order and refund receipts.

Revenue reports

With the new version of MailChimp for Easy Digital Downloads, store owners will have access to store revenue reports inside the MailChimp dashboard. These reports will show the total revenue from the stores connected to the MailChimp account along with the revenue that has been brought in through automation and email campaigns.

These stats provide valuable insights for store owners to help them gauge how effective their email marketing is.

eCommerce automation

Along with the revenue statistics enabled through this new version, it also adds support for many of MailChimp’s eCommerce automation tools. These include options to:

Send email order receipts through MailChimp

Send followup emails to customers after they make a purchase

Send order refund receipts

Take a look at the screenshot below to see some of the automation options available now:

Notes:

Abandoned cart recovery is not yet supported. For the time being, we recommend site owners use Jilt for cart recovery.

After installation of Version 3.0, you will need to go into your MailChimp settings at Downloads → Settings→ Extensions → MailChimp, and configure a default list before any new or old data will sync with MailChimp lists.

The new version of our MailChimp extension is available for update to all customers. If you do not yet have a license key, purchase one today for access to better eCommerce tracking automation tools.

If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, you’re welcome to leave a comment below or get in touch with our pre-sales and support team directly through our support page.

Like the crags and cruxes she encounters in her bouldering adventures, one of the more interesting routes she’s had to navigate has been moving her personal brand online.

Kate is driven by the desire to share her knowledge and experience to help others to achieve their own health and wellness goals, so they too can pursue their own dreams and ambitions, pain-free. With Easy Digital Downloads as the foundation to her websites (yes, there are two!), she has been able to do just that.

Meet Kate!

Through her years as a fitness trainer, chiropractor’s assistant, and a gym coach, Kate often heard people say they had been told over and over that it was normal to feel worse as they aged. This, she says, is a lie.

In her own words, Kate says “I help people move their bodies better.”

I teach you stuff to help you heal your parts that don’t feel or function well, I assist you building unbreakable strength for whatever pursuits your heart desires, I do my best to show you an alternative view of how your future life could be…

Because here’s the deal –if you’ve been told it’s normal to feel worse and do less as you get older, you’ve been lied to.

And isn’t it exciting to imagine a life where the future is whatever you want it to be, aches and pains be damned! I think so – and even if you don’t yet believe that really is a future that can exist for you, if you hang out around here long enough, you just might start believing it. Kate Galliett

Kate runs two websites, Fit For Real Life and The Unbreakable Body. Through these sites she is able to work remotely by offering numerous digital products for sale to new and existing clients.

She sells online video workshops, downloadable eBooks, and occasionally puts on in-person workshops around the country, all of which are built with the goal of helping people to move freely without pain.

With 15 years of experience in the health and wellness industry, Kate had plenty of knowledge that helped her choose the direction and purpose of her websites.

Kate’s clients have strong words of appreciation for the skills and knowledge that she shares:

When I first started working with Kate, I had been suffering with significant shoulder pain and limited range of motion from a wake boarding injury 6 months earlier. I had a difficult time raising my arm, and even getting dressed was a challenge…

…Eight months later, I have been pain-free in both my hip and shoulder for weeks, I am training for a 5 k, have gone for a 20-mile bike ride, and am starting to do progressive resistance training for my shoulder – like push-ups!

Kate’s knowledge and skill are unparalleled, and her eye for details are impressive. More than that, Kate gave me back my confidence. She never pushed me too far, but was a great encourager and cheerleader. After living with pain and limitations for so long, and I can literally say Kate gave me back my life!Cassie Laymon

Through her online platforms, powered by Easy Digital Downloads, Kate has been able to make a positive effect on people in pain while simultaneously achieving the freedom to live out her own adventures.

In talking to her, Kate explained that one of the most important parts of running her business was having a system she could rely on to do its job and then get out of the way so she could do her work.

Knowing EDD will just work once it’s set up means I can feel good about going out to play, and knowing that if someone wants to buy a product of mine, they can, and it will be easy and effortless.Kate Galliett

Along with providing downloadable eBooks, Kate has found that sending her customers a series of follow-up emails using Zapier and Active Campaign to be an exceptionally effective way to strengthen her core business. Kate told us:

I hated the other digital download selling options out there. They were either complicated, or expensive, or complicated AND expensive. With EDD strung together with Zapier, I’m able to send customer information over to Active Campaign to put [customers] into a ‘customer follow-up’ email series. And it wasn’t even complicated to figure out!

Kate’s use of Easy Digital Downloads and the Zapier extension allows her to keep in touch with her customers and clients as she needs to, as well as sell her digital products easily and efficiently.

Whilst a monetary figure or some other growth indicator is one measure of success, it isn’t everyone’s ultimate goal. Kate’s personal definition of success is motivated by helping as many people as she can to achieve a healthy, strong, unbreakable body.

Kate mused on her own personal concept of success: “Success, to me, means I help as many people as possible realize that it’s not normal to feel crummy as you get older, and to help them take action in changing their bodies to be able to support them for the long haul. When people feel better at 55 than they did at 35 because of coaching and education they’ve gotten from me and my products – that’s a success.”

Whatever your goals are, having a clear path for growth and the appropriate tools to pursue them is important to realizing your success. We’re thrilled that Easy Digital Downloads has helped Kate find success as a tool she can set and forget. As a result, she can focus on helping others succeed with their own health goals, whilst allowing her to live her life the way she wants to. Now, the only problems she has to figure out are the ones on the indoor climbing walls or Utah rocks!

Do you have a story like Kate’s? Send us an email at support@easydigitaldownloads and tell us how Easy Digital Downloads gives you The EDDge!

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/the-eddge-kate-galliett/feed/21164219US tax reporting deadlines are approaching… are you ready?https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/us-tax-reporting-deadlines-1099-form/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/us-tax-reporting-deadlines-1099-form/#commentsTue, 09 Jan 2018 15:00:17 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1175451Now that you’ve settled back into the office after your New Year’s holiday celebrations, it’s time to start considering tax reporting that you will need to take care of in the upcoming weeks.

If you are running a multi-vendor marketplace with vendors in the United States, you may have additional tax reporting requirements on top of your usual income, payroll, and sales taxes.

The sale of digital products on behalf of a vendor, for Federal tax purposes, are typically considered to be royalty payments. Those digital products can be anything from photographs, videos, music, PDF documents or e-books, WordPress plugins or themes, fonts, mobile apps, desktop software, and more.

Royalty payments over $10 paid to a vendor during the year is required to be reported on IRS form 1099-MISC.

Note: A common misconception is that only payments totaling $600 or more to an individual are reported on 1099-MISC. While this is true for many types of payments, the threshold for royalty payments is only $10.

What does this mean for store owners?

If you own a multi-vendor marketplace where you are selling digital products on behalf of your U.S. based vendors you may need to report payments to your vendors on IRS form 1099-MISC.

In order to fill out a 1099-MISC, you will need some information up front:

IRS form W-9. The W-9 is a form that your vendors use to provide you information needed to complete their 1099-MISC forms. Information provided on this form includes their name, the type of entity they are (i.e. individual, LLC, corporation, etc.), street address, and taxpayer identification number. Pro tip: It’s good practice to request this information when bringing on new vendors so you don’t have to scramble for it at tax time!

Verify W-9 information. Before filing a 1099-MISC, make sure you verify that the information provided to you is accurate, because there are penalties for filing with an incorrect name or taxpayer identification number. Your accountant should be able to assist with this. You can also verify it directly through the IRS, or through a number of third party services.

Your business’ tax information. This should be fairly straightforward. You will need your business name, address, phone number, and Federal tax identification number.

Total amounts paid. You must total all payments to your US based vendors during the year. This can be a tedious process for many store owners, especially if you have a lot of vendors. Fortunately, there is a plugin called WP1099 that will connect to your shop and provide you with an export of all the payment information that you’ll need for the year.

Filing deadlines

If you are only reporting royalty payments to a vendor, the deadline is February 28, 2018 if paper filing. Or April 2, 2018 if filing electronically. Certain other types of payments may require 1099-MISC to be filed by January 31, 2018.

In addition, your vendors should receive their 1099-MISC copies by January 31, 2018. This is to provide them with sufficient time to file their own income tax returns, which are due in April.

Paper filing versus electronic filing

Paper filing
You must be filing fewer than 250 forms in order to be eligible for paper filing, so for higher volumes, paper filing is not an option. In order to paper file, you must request special copies of the 1099-MISC form from the IRS. When you paper file, the IRS requires a special paper version that you can only get through them. This is so their scanning system can read the form correctly. It also uses thin carbon copy paper, so your typical laser or inkjet printer will rip the paper while printing. Filing a paper version requires an old-fashioned typewriter or special printer.

Electronic filing
Electronic filing (e-filing) has a lot of benefits over paper filing.

For starters, the IRS summary form 1096 is not required for e-filing, as the summary is done for you when you upload your e-file. One less form to worry about!

You can upload one bulk file that contains all of the 1099-MISC information as opposed to preparing each form individually, which will save processing time. You also receive a confirmation when the form was received and processed.

Additionally, the majority of states participate in what’s called the Combined Federal/State Filing Program. This means that when you upload your 1099-MISC e-file to the IRS, they will automatically file with your state’s taxation agency. Check to make sure your state participates in this program. If not, you may still need to file with them separately.

Sending 1099-MISC to vendors

You can choose to send an electronic PDF version of the 1099-MISC to your vendors, or mail a paper copy to them. Many companies prefer sending a paper copy to vendors to avoid the electronic version being caught in a spam filter.

If you choose to send an electronic version, your vendors should be able to give their consent to receiving the electronic version. If they choose to not receive the electronic version, they must still be able to receive a paper copy.

Additional considerations

As with any tax advice you read online, I couldn’t possibly cover all tax situations. Consequently, you will want to check with a local accountant to see if there is anything else you need to consider.

Filing deadlines and required forms may vary from state to state. Your accountant will be able to help determine what and when you need to file.

Your accountant will also be able to help you file the 1099-MISC forms and verify that all the information provided to you by your vendors is correct.

Next steps?

Tax time is here. Here is a list of things to do to make sure you are prepared.

Make sure you get a completed W-9 form from all US based vendors. If you’re a US company with foreign vendors, they will need to fill out a W-8BEN instead. The IRS may audit this information, so be sure to keep it on file.

Identify which vendors have been paid $10 or more during the year. WP1099 is a WordPress plugin that can do this calculation for you in just a few clicks by exporting all vendors and the total amount paid during the year in an e-file friendly format.

File your 1099-MISC with the IRS, your state tax agency (if required), and your vendors. For a small fee, a local accountant can file the 1099-MISC forms for you. A good accountant will double check everything for you, which gives you peace of mind. You can also use a number of third party e-file providers, or file directly with the IRS.

Tax time doesn’t have to be stressful. If you find yourself feeling unprepared, use these tips to get yourself back on track. You’ll thank yourself at this time next year too!

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/us-tax-reporting-deadlines-1099-form/feed/1211754516 tips for pricing your digital productshttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/6-tips-for-pricing-digital-products/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/6-tips-for-pricing-digital-products/#commentsTue, 02 Jan 2018 15:00:35 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1175456Whether you’re starting your first online business, or expanding on your current eCommerce site, pricing your digital products or services will play a significant role in the success of your business.

Over the last five years, we’ve learned a thing or two about pricing, and, it’s true: there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to pricing models. However, while you aren’t likely to sell a dog scarf knitting pattern for the same price as an online course for basket weaving, there are some fundamental elements to consider when figuring out how to price your digital products.

1. Keep your friends close and your competitors closer

Checking out your competitors is one of the first things you should do when you’re ready to determine your pricing. Your products or services should be priced fairly for you and your customers, whilst taking into account the value your offering provides. Pricing your products much lower than your competition can devalue your products and lead your customers to believe the quality isn’t as good as your competitor’s product. Pricing your products higher than your competition shows your customers that you bring something more to the table.

When comparing your potential prices to those of your competitors, consider the following:

What features does your product or service offer that your competitor’s product doesn’t?

What makes not just your product or service great, but also your company?

Who are you selling your products or services to?

Don’t be afraid to stand out in the crowd. Take a look at your competitors and see what they’re doing – they’re likely checking you out as well.

2. Pricing is all about value

We sell products to solve a problem and enrich the lives of others. With the amount of time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears (and oftentimes rude words) that go into creating these products, the hope is to also profit from our ability to solve that particular problem.

If you create a plugin that is essential to the success of an online store, such as a payment gateway, that provides immense value to a user. They literally could not run a store without taking payments on their website.

If you sell a complex sewing pattern on your site, you are giving your customers the gift of enjoyment that comes with creating something handmade, without the stress and the “how-on-earth-do-I-do-this?!” emotions.

You’re providing your customers with a key component they need to accomplish a task. You’re saving them time so they don’t have to do something themselves. You’re providing value.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

Warren Buffett

Software development, writing, and designing ain’t easy! Considering the value of your product is incredibly important when determining price. And while it sounds difficult to put a price on your time spent, or their time saved, most people simply won’t even consider the time you spent creating the product they buy from you (harsh, but true). Whether you’ve spent hours, weeks, or months on a product, to a customer, they are buying something that will allow them to save time, save money, save effort, or will make their life better in some way. That is the real value you’re selling to your customers.

If your product is the right fit for your customer’s specific needs, they’ll pay a higher price. You’re reading this because you create incredible digital products to sell – don’t underestimate your own worth!

3. Hosting Services, Gateway Fees, Marketing Costs, OH MY!

The excitement of starting your business and making that first sale can quickly fade when you start to add up running costs. When you figure hosting, gateway fees, and marketing costs into your budget you may realize that you’ll need to sell a lot of $1.99 music downloads to cover monthly expenses and make a profit. For example, Stripe Pay As You Go pricing currently charges 2.9% + $.30 per successful card charge. After all the hard work you put into that $1.99 piano solo, you’re keeping $1.40.

Yep… $1.40.

When pricing your products, think long-term and look towards the future. Price higher than you think you initially should.

What is the first price that comes to mind that you believe you could safely sell your product for? Write it down, and now raise it 20%.Martiel Beatty

As your site grows and your product features or benefits expand, your operating costs will also rise. Introducing price increases for existing digital products or services down the road may discourage existing customers from renewing or purchasing newly-released products.

Pricing higher to start with will help you avoid a drastic increase in the future to cover any additional expenses. Remember to factor in the after sale costs when picking that just-right price. It also means you can partake in seasonal promotion periods like big holiday sales, or your own promotions, and still be able to to cover your expenses without bottoming out! Price your products or your service higher than your gut tells you.

4. Customer service doesn’t end at checkout

The “Customer Experience” encompasses every touchpoint a customer has with your business. From visiting your website, to completing a purchase, to after-purchase interactions, to receiving a follow-up email, and so on. The interaction with your customers should never stop when a sale is completed.

One aspect of ongoing customer interaction is customer support. The amount of support requests generated from selling digital products can be hard to anticipate, and is based on your business and the product or products you sell. Selling plugins and themes will yield more after-purchase support than selling eBooks or digital photography. These requests can range from complex technical issues to simple refund requests.

Spend some time thinking about the volume and difficulty of the customer requests you’re likely to receive. Can you handle these requests and keep your customers happy on your own? Or will you need to bring on some help? Have you attracted the right customers for the value you’re providing and the services you’re selling?

Take a moment to consider this scenario: You’re selling a hot new plugin that offers all the bells and whistles. To reach a larger customer base and compete in your industry, you’ve decided to price it at $29 per license. Each one of those customers may have after-sale support needs.

Now consider the effects of pricing that plugin just a bit higher – let’s say $58. You’re showing a more representative value of the available features, and attracting higher quality customers. There are now fewer customers which will result in a lower number of interactions after the sale, and you’re making the same amount of money.

5. Variety is the spice of life

Quantity and quality are the two main characteristics that come to mind when someone mentions tiered pricing. The more you get, the better the value, the more you pay. Tiered pricing creates variety which allows you to reach a wider audience, and this pricing model can apply to nearly every digital product available.

If you sell digital photography you may have a low resolution, and high resolution, version of each image. When faced with multiple price points, customers will often pick the middle-of-the-road option. The lowest price may not present as much value to your customers as the highest price point, but the highest priced option may be slightly out of reach. One size does not fit all and offering tiered pricing allows your customers to pick the option that’s best for their needs, and budget.

6. Would you like fries (AND a drink) with that?

If you’ve ever been to a fast food restaurant and purchased a “Number 4”, you’ve taken advantage of bundled pricing. Why pay for each, individual component, when you can take advantage of a pre-made bundle? It’s easier to purchase and offers a better value versus purchasing each item individually. Bundling digital products can be a great way to offer your customers the same ease, and value.

When creating bundled pricing for your products make sure the products complement one another, and that it will provide value to your customers. Bundle your newest yoga video with a meditation guide to achieve maximum zen. Bundle a premium plugin with a premium theme and give your customers an all-in-one website solution at a slightly discounted price – it’s better than buying them separately!

You know your business best

Pricing isn’t an exact science. It’s subjective, and depends greatly on the customers you’re targeting, the products/services you’re selling, and the value you’re providing. So before you throw a number at that new product in the hopes it sticks, think about the short-term, and long-term factors. Competition, value, and cost are just a few of the defining aspects in the decision you make.

At the end of the business day, remember that it’s an impossible feat to please everyone. The pricing decisions you make should be based on some of the tips mentioned in this article, but also on your company goals. Be nimble if you choose to be, but ultimately, stay true to your business model and beliefs.

Have you employed any pricing tactics for your own business? What pricing advice would you give to someone just starting their online store?

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/6-tips-for-pricing-digital-products/feed/141175456Free Downloads 2.2.0 improved with better performance and email verification featurehttps://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/free-downloads-2-2-0-improved-better-performance-email-verification-feature/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/free-downloads-2-2-0-improved-better-performance-email-verification-feature/#respondTue, 28 Nov 2017 18:00:36 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1159164A little over a year ago, we announced a Easy Digital Downloads extension called Free Downloads that improved the customer experience when ‘purchasing’ a free item. Today, I’m pleased to present to you, version 2.2.0. Over the last year we’ve received substantial feedback from users and improved many existing aspects of the extension, as well as added some key features that will make distributing free products even easier for store owners.

Refactored/Redesigned modal

In 2.2.0, we’ve completely refactored the modal presented to users from the ground up and removed the dependency on 3rd party JavaScript libraries. Don’t worry though, it should look nearly (if not exactly) the same as it previously did. We maintained as much backwards compatibility as possible. In doing this, we’ve reduced the overall complexity of Free Downloads, which makes it more reliable and easier for us to maintain, which will result in less unexpected behavior.

Email verification

Possibly one of the most requested features, was the ability to ‘verify’ email addresses, to help prevent using fake email addresses when requesting a free download. Now, Free Downloads includes a feature that requires customers to ‘confirm’ their email prior to being provided with access to your digital goods. When users enter their email address, they are informed they will get an email to confirm their download. Once received, the user just needs to click the provided link, and Free Downloads will handle the rest, either delivering the product immediately, or redirecting the user to the desired page. When combined with an email marketing extension, this feature can help improve the quality of your subscribers as it requires the user have a functioning email address to complete the process.

Improved ‘On Complete Handler’ features

One option included with Free Downloads is the ability to redirect a user to a specific page after completing their ‘purchase’. Free Downloads now appends the ‘purchase key’ (used to look up the customer and purchase data) to the query string of the redirect URL, allowing you to build a custom template and include personalized data about the customer or requested files on that redirect page.

Other fixes and improvements

While the above items are new features added, there were a slew of issues that were fixed alongside them.

]]>https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/free-downloads-2-2-0-improved-better-performance-email-verification-feature/feed/01159164Introducing the new All Access Pass – Get every extension in a single purchase!https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/introducing-new-access-pass-get-every-extension-single-purchase/
https://easydigitaldownloads.com/blog/introducing-new-access-pass-get-every-extension-single-purchase/#commentsMon, 20 Nov 2017 20:46:14 +0000https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?p=1151794Today we are excited to announce the launch of our new All Access Pass for Easy Digital Downloads extensions. This allows you to get access to every extension in our catalogue with a single purchase at a huge discount!

With a purchase of the All Access Pass you will get immediate access to every extension sold on our site and you will receive a single license key that has unlimited activations and can be used for all extensions. One key, unlimited activations, all extensions.

The All Access Pass is perfect for agencies, freelancers, and anyone else that uses a large number of extensions. Priced at just $899 for an annual subscription, the All Access Pass is the most affordable option for purchasing EDD extensions. If every extension was purchased separately, it would cost more than $5,000. In fact, it is less costly to purchase the All Access Pass than it is to purchase separate unlimited licenses to two of our mostpopular extensions and a payment gateway, and the All Access Pass gets you everything.

If you have already purchased extensions, worry not! We have added a simple upgrade option for all customers. You can upgrade any existing license key to the All Access Pass from your account page. Your upgrade will be automatically discounted by the amount you have spent in extension purchases within the last 365 days. For example, if you purchased a single site license to Recurring Payments for $199 earlier this year, you can upgrade your license to the All Access Pass for $700. The discount will be automatically applied when you add the upgrade to your cart.

Once you have purchased the All Access Pass, you will be given access to download any and all extensions available on this site. The license key that is issued with your All Access Pass purchase can also be used with any extension. No more having to track down and activate a dozen or more license keys! One key for everything. This also means that when your annual renewal rolls around, it will be a single renewal payment for everything. One purchase, one license key, one renewal, all extensions.

The All Access Pass is available today! Head over to the product page for more information or, if you have questions, leave a comment here. We will be happy to help!